Solutions for digital transformation

Jörg Vollmer, Head of Swiss Post Solutions, Member of Executive Management

Swiss Post Solutions is committed to innovative IT solutions

The automation systems of the future are intelligent. They will learn new skills themselves. These groundbreaking technologies will bring big potential savings for companies – and open up new business areas for Swiss Post.

Jörg Vollmer, what opportunities do you see for Swiss Post Solutions in the highly competitive international outsourcing market?

Swiss Post's image around the world is very good. That opens the doors for international companies in Switzerland, and also abroad. We focus on document solutions, where we're already number two in Europe. Swiss Post Solutions operates more than 450 mailrooms around the world for its customers. We scan more than a billion documents per year and print around 1.2 billion invoices, salary statements and bank statements. In this respect, we're already well positioned. In document solutions, we want to combine the physical and digital worlds even more closely and support our customers in the so-called digital transformation. This will open up further potential for profitable growth for us.

How does Swiss Post Solutions support companies in the digital transformation?

Most of our customers, such as banks, insurance companies and energy suppliers, are faced with the challenge of creating uniform business processes worldwide. The goal of this is to exploit the opportunities of the digital world – the Internet, e-mail, mobility and social media – in order to create added value for the end customer. Physical documents interfere with optimized business processes – and this is where Swiss Post Solutions comes in: we harmonize incoming documents for our customers across all channels, regardless of whether they require the scanning of physical documents or the processing of e-mails. But there's more to it than transmitting electronic images of documents: it's about the automatic reading of data. That's the crucial issue. We use market-leading software solutions to extract data from invoices or payment slips. New methods such as artificial intelligence even allow us to read unstructured data automatically.

In terms of document output, in addition to printing, we also offer electronic channels including portals, electronic invoices, E-Post Office or IncaMail, the digital registered letter. Ultimately, end customers can decide for themselves how they want to receive their salary statement or mobile phone bill. Today, around 80 percent still opt for the paper version. But the trend is towards the digital form. For Swiss Post Solutions, it's not a question of either/or: we combine the physical and digital worlds, so that our customers have the choice.

What are your goals in terms of numbers?

Our goals are ambitious, but realistic. We want to continue to grow faster than the market – and using our own resources. But the important thing is that we grow profitably and continue to develop strategically. We succeeded very well in this in 2014, and the result for 2015 confirms that we're on the right track. Our profit expectations for the future remain ambitious. For the 7,700 or so people employed by Swiss Post Solutions, this is both an acknowledgement and an incentive.