Fulmine Group: The QES linking recipient and sender
Success Stories: Experiences in the Digital Sphere told by Businesses Themselves
Paper is everywhere… in the mailbox, on your windshield, inside delivery bags, or on the counter at the pharmacy. Much of it ends up stuffed into a drawer, or tossed in the bin (the recycling bin, we hope!).
How much of this paper is actually necessary? And in how many times would it be possible, in fact, to make the transaction paperless and less of a hassle?
Some of this paper important, though, and keeping it somewhere safe and accessible is necessary. In those situations, digitalisation can be quite helpful, but may require some extra care, especially in terms of legal documents.
Fulmine Group was launched in Palermo in 2007. Today, it runs one of the main mail-delivery services in Italy, with 400 branch offices and 10 hubs. The hallmarks of the Fulmine (Italian for “lightning”) Group are its efficient IT infrastructure and its vision, which is based on technological innovation with a focus on customer experience. In the summer of 2020, Fulmine reached out to Intesa (IBM Group) to try to find a way to eliminate return receipts on registered correspondence with advice of delivery.
“We were looking for a solution that was both innovative and paperless for our customers, in terms of registered mail with advice of delivery. We wanted to replace the paper receipt, whilst providing the customer an alternative that would just as surely prove the correspondence had been received”, explains Roberto Tinervia, ICT Director at the Fulmine Group.
“Return receipts are an important document because they are a record issued by a public-service contractor, which creates a presumption of receipt that can only be overcome through a court action to prove a forgery”.* How, then, to digitalise this document whilst ensuring it will be valid in legal proceedings?
“The complexity and the biggest challenge of this project was finding a solution that would provide a means of obviating the paper receipt, whilst still passing legal muster, and ensuring validity for the customer. Intesa helped us complete the project by providing consultancy on both the technology and the legal-compliance fronts”, noted Tinervia.
The idea was to allow the recipient to sign using a digital device, and then, once the receipt was filled out with the delivery information, to have the postal carrier place their qualified e-signature on the document using certificates issued by Intesa’s CA.
Intesa also provided the Fulmine Group support in terms of postal-carrier training on the use of their assigned QES.
The solution was launched in January of 2021, after only just a few months’ incubation. This rapid-fire implementation led to immediate benefits, both in-house and for the customer (from the Fulmine Group’s perspective, the registered-mail sender): “We saw costs savings immediately. Our service used to include, for any hard-copy registered mail, scanning the return receipts and uploading them to our website, where the customer could access them whenever they wanted. Now, we have eliminated that manual step; receipts are automatically uploaded to the website within a few hours. Furthermore, we no longer need to transport the receipts from our branch offices to our hub, and then back to the sender”.
Tangible benefits just a few months out from project launch, leading the Fulmine Group to ponder its next steps, including whether to move towards paperless mail-delivery attempts with a read-receipt created using a digital ID. But that another Success Story for another time.
* Source: leggepertutti.it, Registered mail is not evidence without advice of receipt
