DENVER - Buying stamps and walking to the mailbox may be a thing of the past if one company has its way.
That's because Zumbox wants to transfer the physical bills and letters that companies mail out to customers through the postal service to a digital postal system.
The company has created a digital mailbox for every address in the country and says hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to have their mail delivered online since the system went public last summer.
"The reaction we get from people has two parts," John Payne, CEO of Zumbox, told 9NEWS. "First they say, 'Gosh this is new. I've never heard of this.' And then the second thing they say is, 'This is inevitable.'"
Zumbox works with utility and insurance companies as well as banks and other financial intuitions to take statements that are currently printed and mailed out and convert them to digital files that are delivered through their website, Zumbox.com.
The companies pay Zumbox a fee for delivering the mail digitally. Payne says many are eager to participate because the system lowers costs.
"We actually make our money on the back end by reducing the costs for transactional mailers, who obviously spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on postage every year in order to be able to send everything from insurance documents to bills and statements," Payne said. "So what happens is they pay us a small digital delivery fee instead of paying a very large physical delivery and manufacturing fee to the postal service and to mailing companies."
That helps keep the site free to use.
Once people register and confirm their address and account information with Zumbox, their mail shows up as envelopes in their account which can then be opened and read.
Zumbox keeps the mail for as long the customer wants and makes it keywords searchable, which is why Payne says many people sign up, using the site for digital record keeping.
Payne says the company is subject to all federal privacy laws including PCI, HIPAA and BITS security standards.
"Each industry has its own separate compliance. So we have to be in compliance with all of them. Because we handle credit cards and various other payment industry things we have to be compliant with PCI. Because we have healthcare information and insurance information we have to be in compliance with HIPPA. Because we deal regularity with financial institutions we have to be compliant with BITS," Payne said. "So there are all these acronym certifications that kind of no one has ever heard of but that are very specific and we spend a lot of time being in compliance with them in order to assure the security and privacy of our user's content."
However, Payne says signing up for Zumbox doesn't mean users have to stop receiving physical mail. They can elect to receive both physical and digital copies of their letters or choose to go paperless on only certain mail.
For more information please visit Zumbox.com.
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