Digital postal mail services provider Zumbox wants consumers to be able to access all of their transactional mail in one central digital repository. To accomplish this, the company recently signed several deals intended to make it easy for transactional mailers and print service providers to divert a mail print stream to Zumbox’s online platform. The company expects to announce additional similar partnerships in the coming months. Zumbox’s focus is on transactional mail right now because it believes this is where the biggest need currently exists for its services, says John Payne, CEO at Zumbox. Paperless statements offered by financial mailers “have been unsuccessful because, for the consumer, it means you are taking something away from them,” says Payne. With Zumbox’s digital postal mail, the benefits include a document that recipients can print when they need it as well as the ability to pay and set up payment reminders. Zumbox also stores all recipients’ documents for free in a digital archive that is searchable so consumers can find what they want when they need it. As a result, Payne says Zumbox addresses such consumers concerns around transactional mail as the need to keep a physical copy for their records, the fear that they won’t be able to find their records if they’re stored in a variety of places on the Internet and the need to have a physical copy of a bill around as a reminder to pay. Zumbox is different from e-mail in that it’s a closed system, explains Payne. Consumers who sign up for the service are asked to verify their address, which the company accomplishes by sending them a PIN number in the mail and asking them to key it in. And anyone sending digital postal mail has been certified by Zumbox. For print service providers, being able to offer their customers digital services such as digital postal mail may result in lower revenues but the gross margin will be significantly higher, insists Payne. Digital postal mail is also a new service that PSP’s can offer that can potentially save their customers money by helping increase paper suppression rates. In May, Zumbox initiated a strategy to make its digital postal mail platform available for license by postal authorities and commercial entities. One of the biggest deals to come out of this initiative so far was revealed on August 2. This is when Zumbox announced that DST Output Inc., one of the largest mail output service providers, would make the Zumbox service available to its 600-plus clients. The most recent partnership, announced last week, is with print-stream solutions provider Crawford Technologies. The deal calls for Crawford Technologies to begin offering its customers – who include direct mailers and print service providers – with a software plug-in that will enable them to redirect the print stream from a physical device to Zumbox’s virtual mail platform. This is Zumbox’s first technology integration with a third-party software solution. Once the company has all transactional mailers funneling through its platform, it plans to start going after other types of marketing mail, says Payne. “What the consumer really wants is to have paper mail clutter under control,” he notes.