By Barb Pellow & Matt Swain, InfoTrends

We live in a digital age, yet between 85 and 90 percent of consumers still choose to receive paper statements, frustrating mailers' best efforts to convince their customers to switch to the more cost-efficient e-bills. According to a recent research report from InfoTrends entitled The Future of Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment in North America, only 10% to 15% of bills and statements are delivered exclusively through electronic means in North America, but this is going to change… and change quickly.

Due to increasing consumer comfort with technology, broader access to the Web, and companies’ focus on cost reduction, we are seeing an increased interest in secure digital mail services in the United States. While some global markets have been successful in driving consumer and mailer adoption, the U.S. is a substantially larger and more fragmented market. At the same time, however, it is only a matter of time before secure digital mail services take hold in an environment where consumers want greater convenience, security, control, and environmental friendliness.

What is Secure Digital Mail?
“Secure digital mail” refers to new cloud-based mail consolidation that will empower consumers to receive, view, organize, and manage bills, statements, direct marketing, catalogs, coupons, and other content from multiple providers using a single application. It is designed as an electronic version of the user’s traditional mailbox with additional capabilities such as online bill payment, organizational tools, content uploading capabilities, and archiving. Early consolidation services were focused strictly on bill and statement consolidation, but secure services extend capabilities way beyond this.

It Starts With Consumer Awareness
During InfoTrends' study entitled The Future of Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment in North America, consumers were asked about their familiarity with bill consolidators. While this survey questioned just a sampling of providers, it provides some interesting insights. Beyond consumers’ banking Websites and some general familiarity with Quicken (likely as a financial management tool, not as a bill consolidator), consumers in North America are not very familiar with bill consolidators. In fact, only 26% of consumers were familiar with bill consolidators other than their own banking Websites and Quicken.



The Changing Landscape
A number of start-ups are currently offering secure digital mail services. Zumbox was released in February of 2009 and is the longest-standing secure digital mail service. It is the most literal version of a mailbox in that there is a “Zumbox” for every physical street address in the United States. Zumbox’s business model includes an external marketing and advertising channel. This creates an incentive for direct mail houses to partner with Zumbox, but users can opt out of unwanted marketing. Zumbox provides the option to continue receiving paper versions of its mail, but it encourages users to go paperless by providing a “Paperless Please” icon for each sender.



doxo was launched in October of 2010 and is backed by investment firms Bezos Expeditions, Mohr Davidow, and Sigma Partners. The service is positioned as “an online file cabinet” that enables consumers to paperlessly receive, manage, pay, and file their bills and other important documents from multiple service providers in one place. Doxo is built along the lines of a traditional bill consolidation model, but it has additional functionality and provides an attractive business model for billers seeking customer print suppression. In return for using the free service, customers are required to stop receiving print versions. This service is differentiated by the fact that it leads with a paper suppression mandate. InfoTrends’ research shows that billers are aggressive in their desire to drive paper suppression, and doxo is confident that this will convince billers to partner with the company.

Manilla is an online account consolidation service that formally launched at DEMO Spring 2011 in Palm Desert, California in March of 2011. If you are not familiar with the event, DEMO is billed as the launchpad for emerging technologies–with notable alumni such as E*TRADE, iRobot, Java, Palm, Salesforce.com, Skype, TiVo, and WebEx.

Manilla, backed by Hearst Corporation, started providing closed beta access in March. The service is designed to simplify consumers’ account management through support of four account categories, namely finance, household/bills, magazine subscriptions, and travel reward programs. One valuable differentiator for Manilla is that users can access all of their accounts immediately, regardless of whether or not Manilla has established a partnership with the biller or magazine subscription provider. This way, Manilla can build its partnerships in the background while still delivering a fully functional service to its users. Premier relationships announced with this release include Citi Cards and Comcast. 



Launched in January 2011, Pitney Bowes' Volly offering is an opt-in, spam-free, secure digital delivery service that the company hopes will become consumers’ digital version of their traditional mailboxes—while they are ready to transition. Similar to other offerings, Volly can solve a problem for high-volume mailers and customers alike. The benefit to the end-customer is a consolidated location to manage all digital mail, while the benefit to the mailers is cost savings as electronic adoption increases and delivery through traditional means decreases. Pitney Bowes’ marketing material states that within a Volly account, “individuals can receive, view, and pay their bills; browse and purchase from their favorite catalogs; and receive relevant, useful coupons and discount offers.” To help make this work, Pitney Bowes is engaging in numerous strategic partnerships with key high-volume mailers.

Like Everything Else, It's About Marketing and Consumer Awareness!
Marketing will play a significant role in the success of secure digital mailbox services. InfoTrends’ research shows that billers are using a variety of methods to drive their customers to adopt electronic communications. The Figure below shows the Top 5 strategies used, compared to the relative perceived effectiveness of each. Marketing the convenience of electronic presentment is considered the most effective strategy for billers, and it also the most common strategy in use.



Billers and other high-volume mailers need to intensify marketing efforts with an emphasis on convenience and value to entice consumers to adopt digital mail solutions.

The Bottom Line
It's time to imagine the cloud-based equivalent of a consumer’s physical mailbox—a virtual receptacle where the user can accumulate bills, statements, coupons, catalogs, and almost anything else that he or she is accustomed to receiving from business mailers, but in purely digital form. The tools are emerging for managing and archiving the inflow, blocking spam, paying bills online, opting into promotional offers, and uploading one’s own documents into this private, customizable, and ultra-secure environment. Due to the combination of cloud-based services, consumers with mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops), and a focus on the environment, it is only a matter of time before the concept of “secure digital mail” becomes a reality.

Due to the growing activity in the area of secure digital mail services, InfoTrends plans to conduct a comprehensive study of this market during the second half of 2011. Stay tuned!

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