Australia Post faces challenges from the banks — who already provide the ability to pay bills from their online services — and from direct competitors in the secure mailbox space.
One such competitor is Computershare, who has proposed a similar service called Digital Post. Digital Post is almost identical to the Digital MailBox, so much so that Australia Post took Computershare to court to try and prevent is using the name Digital Post. It lost the battle, leaving the coast clear for a race to see who can provide the service in Australia first.
Here, Computershare may have the advantage, having already launched a service publicly in the US in partnership with Zumbox. It has also launched the service in Australia in a limited private release.
The big question however is whether digital mail is a solution looking for a problem that hasn’t already been solved. Here, I am not convinced. The technology to achieve a digital mailbox using ordinary email with digital signatures and encryption has been around for a very long time. Despite improvements in infrastructure and the ease of use, it has never really taken off, mostly because there has never been the perception that it was really needed in the first place.
Another big problem has been that digital signatures and identity services were fine as long as you were dealing with the purely digital, but never really quite accommodated the need to also operate in the physical world. One immediate irony is that to prove identity, you often have to present paper copies of bills sent to a postal address!
Even Computershare CEO Stuart Crosby had a hard time convincing a slightly sceptical Alan Kohler of ABC’s Inside Business that Digital Post Australia was a viable business proposition. He said “One of the exciting things about these sorts of businesses […] is that you don’t know the answers”.
I expect that Australia Post is none the wiser. Fortunately for them, they don’t have shareholders asking those questions, including what part of the $2 billion is going to be invested in this scheme. If they did, I expect they would be prepared to never see that money again.
Associate Professor David Glance is director of the UWA Centre for Software Practice, a UWA research and development centre. Originally a physiologist working in the area of vascular control mechanisms in pregnancy, Professor Glance subsequently worked in the software industry for over 20 years before spending the last 10 years at UWA. This article first appeared on The Conversation.
