La Poste is about to launch an innovation at the crossroads of two worlds: a “digital stamp”, for French people who always want to send letters and postcards, and are ready to frank them using their smartphone. . The public group has indeed announced, Tuesday, June 28, this new service, which will be available at the beginning of 2023. “It gives everyone the opportunity, regardless of location or time”to post a letter “without having a stamp on hand, thanks to a unique eight-digit code purchased on the La Poste application, in three clicks”, explains the operator. The customer must copy this code on the envelope, in the space provided for the stamp.
“It’s a real industrial and technological feat, which no other post in the world has managed to launch”, welcomed the group, which relied on its subsidiary Probayes, acquired in 2016, specializing in data and artificial intelligence, to create algorithms derived from cryptography. This model allows “to generate several million secure codes with only eight characters”codes “sufficiently different from each other to both tolerate low reading errors and minimize the risk of fraud”promises La Poste.
This new online stamp will however have to find its audience, between the 13 million French people far from digital and those, also numerous, refractory to postal mail.
A vast investment plan
This initiative is part of a vast investment plan of 800 million euros for the postal network over the next five years, which will be devoted to both digital and the modernization of post offices. By the end of 2027, they should all have been renovated.
Over the years, this network has shrunk significantly, with the number of offices dropping from nearly 10,000 in 2012 to just over 7,000 today. A policy that La Poste justifies in particular by a sharp drop in attendance (it recorded, in 2021, an average of 900,000 visitors per day, compared to nearly 2 million ten years ago).
At the same time, to maintain a basic service on the territory, the group continues to open La Poste relays installed in merchants. Today there are more than 3,000, and La Poste wants to increase the density of this network. Discussions are in progress with a dozen traditional brands, including E.Leclerc and Carrefour.
The operator also wants to take advantage of the boom in e-commerce and accelerate the deployment of its Pickup lockers, which allow customers to collect or drop off parcels at its post offices, in stations or in stores in the large distribution. Its objective is to go from 800 lockers today to 2,000 in 2023. Other major players are investing in this market: Amazon and its Lockers, and the second-hand product sales platform Vinted, which will offer its Ile-de-France customers lockers installed in around twenty Franprix (Casino Group) and Carrefour supermarkets, from the end of June.