Alongside the 27th Universal Postal Congress in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire on 9 to 27 August, there will be a number of side events covering key trends in the postal sector and looking in detail at some of the Universal Postal Union’s (UPU) main projects.
Side Events Programme: https://bit.ly/3CvzdmP
One of those projects is the Quality of Service Fund (QSF), which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. On 16 August there will be a special reception to launch a new publication, which will commemorate 20 years of the funding mechanism and highlight success stories from the past two decades. The reception aims to raise awareness of the QSF funding platform to a wider audience.
Meanwhile, the UPU’s Postal Technology Centre (PTC) will host several sessions covering everything from big data, the Integrated Quality Reporting System (IQRS), postal payment technologies, the Customs Declaration System (CDS), the Domestic Postal System (DPS), and future innovations.
At Congress on 11 August, PTC will host a session on how it uses big data for quality of service reporting and its future plans to use big data to enhance postal security. On 12 and 18 August, PTC will run a session on postal payment technologies and future innovations. The session will cover information on the family of IT services offered by the PTC for postal payments and how it plans to build on this offering through enhanced services such as the UPU Interconnection Platform (UPU-IP).
Finally, on 17 August, the PTC will host a session on the CDS and DPS, which will look at how these solutions can help operators with EAD compliance, highlight upcoming innovations within the DPS, and outline how third-party software solutions are being integrated for better quality data for EAD.
Aside from the PTC events, there will also be a series of seminars on the top-level domain .POST. The first session on 19 August will look at cybersecurity trends and risks, and how the postal sector can benefit from .POST’s cybersecurity policies and tools, including the new compliance monitor, cybertrack.post.
On 23 August, a seminar will be held on partnerships for digital innovation through .POST. The session will look at the use of blockchain for digital philately and how startups are working with .POST for collaborative innovation.
There will also be virtual sessions on innovations in digital financial services (DFS) and the posts’ role in the health sector. For the former, which will be held on 18 August, the UPU will reveal the findings of a recent study into the levers and drivers of innovation in DFS. This study defines a DFS innovation framework for posts, identifies key lessons learned by posts, and provides a set of recommendations to guide DOs and policy makers on their innovation journey.
The posts’ role in the health sector session, which will be held on 16 August, will look at three key areas – the role of the UPU in supporting posts in the health space; a presentation by the USPS OIG on its Partnering for Health: Potential Postal Service Roles in Health and Wellness report; and an example of how a post coped during COVID-19. The session will provide a shared understanding of the opportunities for postal operators to diversify in the health sector.
Finally, the winner of this year’s International Letter Writing Competition for Young People will be announced in plenary on the last day of Congress (August 27). This year represents the 50th anniversary of the competition.