So in the morning, we discussed trust and security and sustainability. These were the two topics we were focusing on. And as you know, in the morning, we have our vision sessions. So we have postal CEOs there that share their experiences, that share their views. And we had some very, very good discussions. And we had also a good involvement from the audience here, so I would ask you again, if you have questions, if you have views, if you have comments, get involved, raise your hand, stand up and share it with the others here and ask questions to the panelists. So in the afternoon here, we are starting with trust and security. That's going to be our first session. Then we have a short break. And then we have our sustainability session. Let me introduce now to you the panelists of this trust and security session. We have Sven Kuckermel, he is the Vice President of International Business of omnibus. We have Dipty Gupta. She is global pro-serve supply chain solution. That's a long word, isn't it? She is from Amazon Web Services. We have Brody Bula, he's the CEO of Escher Group. And we have Latima Tata, he's the director from the PTC, the Postal Technology Center at the UPU. And I would like to start right away with a discussion or with the presentations first. And Sven, e-commerce and data, that's, of course, something that is very, very relevant. And maybe you would like to talk about security trust in that area. Thanks. Bear in mind how short I am. I need to stand up so that you would all see me. So please bear with me. So the question about e-commerce and data is that we can have a puzzle, but if you actually don't know who it's for, from where, what is inside, then you can't process that puzzle. And the challenge we're facing in the postal world is that this kind of data gets mixed up. Someone orders a puzzle on, let's say, Aliexpress from China. Then it is produced, sold. But in order to make sure that that data is not compromised, seen by anyone else, then some of the fields are deleted, then they reappear, then they delete them again, and then they reappear to be compliant with the GDPR and all of these requirements. And this is why we are seeing so many challenges linked with data security. And we're trying to void bridges, and that's why we don't enable the data to be seen by everyone. And as we do that, we're not able to offer ultimate service. We normally have somewhere around 15% of parcels which is missing vital data, which was there at the time of the development of that puzzle. So how do we, what is the solution which we could do in order to implement it? Well, everyone knows nowadays, when you have a smartphone, you can use Type-C charger because it's a standard. We've established that this is the standard for how do we charge the phones. So why we wouldn't be able to implement all over the world, that there is one integration standard for data. For example, based on blockchain. Blockchain allows you to show the original data. You will be able to keep the same data flow. You don't have to cut it through into pieces, but you will actually be working all the time with the same data from the beginning all the way to the end. And why I talk about this part here in trust security, it is always about the trust that when we're working, for example, in Scandinavian market, a lot of people are afraid to give their phone numbers, email addresses to a Chinese vendor because I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what's going to happen there. So how do we overcome that? And how do we actually make sure that the last mile delivery for whom you are actually happy to give that data will receive the correct one? So one is data, and second one is safe and secure global shopping. Because if I order today a parcel from anywhere in the world, to be honest, then I need to always bear in mind, okay, if I paid now and it doesn't get delivered, how do I get it returned? Because the legislation in each of the country is different. And we don't have global products. We don't have global standards. Amazon sets their standard what they want. eBay sets there. I'll express their standard, et cetera. And then we have the postal world, UPU with their standards, which don't provide global COD, which doesn't provide global return solution, which doesn't provide competitive global pricing for the returns. Even inside the Europe, when we're talking about return service, I can get a parcel delivered in Poland for two and a half euros in order to get the return six and a half euros. So why would a shopper or e-commerce platform be willing to put in six euros, triple the price almost, for a parcel which is actually loss making for him? Because return means that the trade didn't go through. It didn't happen as it was supposed to. And then also the same issue still with the global tracking that we still have products where in 2023, we're talking about that not all parcels have the tracking link to that. And these are the key words which we need to make sure to implement if we actually want to make sure that we have a safe, secure, and really truly global shopping opportunity available to our vendors and people. So from my perspective, purchase has to be made easy and then we're really going to get into the global shopping part. As long as we keep those barriers up, we're still going to see that. And that is very clearly linked with trust and security and how to make that trust and security transform into the end consumer, the one who's actually making the choice on the platform and how we enable that also for the last mile deliveries that they get access to that kind of a data. So that's my starter. I'm pretty sure you're going to have afterwards good discussions. Perfect, thank you very much. That was perfect. And I mean, very much in time, only half the time you've granted you. Haven't seen that till the end here. But that's good. Dipty, how does a robust data strategy now really enhance customer experience and also drive business value? Do we have some answers for that on that? Yes. If I can figure out how to move the... Yeah, this is now... I think... That's the closing, that's the closing slide. Sorry about that. Okay, good. So let me start off by introducing myself. My name is Dipty Gupta and I head the logistics and transportation industry vertical within AWS, the professional services arm of AWS. So we work with customers in the logistics and transportation space to solve their business problems. My background is in logistics and transportation for a very long time. Most recently, before joining AWS, I was leading multi-carrier, parcel shipping software company and we sold it to another company before I joined AWS. So have been in this space for a very long time. The world is changing. I order packages on Amazon.com. I order food on Uber Eats and every time I order something on my phone, I look for tracking. I want to know exactly when I will get it, when I will get it and what condition I'll get it and if I'm not at home, how can I ensure that it gets delivered on time, right? So what that means is there is a lot of data that is being created and as a consumer I would like to consume that data. There is explosion of people and personas. There is a shipper, somebody who's shipping the product, somebody who's actually moving your packages and parcels or product, somebody who's actually receiving the package and each of those personas have different requirements of what they want to see and that is causing a need for having real-time decision-making with that data. I have a lot of data. I have a lot of expectations from my customers and I need to leverage that data to do things and make decisions very real-time. It can't be something that was done early in the morning and that lasts for the whole day. So how do we work with this explosion of data? Before I answer that question, let me tell you about Amazon.com. Amazon.com was in one company in 2000, in one country in 2000. We had only 73 fulfillment centers. It took us 18 hours to move a package through the fulfillment center. In 2022, we have 185-plus fulfillment centers. We process 45-plus million requests per second. We have 100 million automated ordering plans. We have 20,000 transportation trailers. The volume grew and it now takes us only two hours to process a parcel through the fulfillment center. How did we do that? We grew the scale of our operations. We got a ton more data. We leveraged huge IoT robotics everywhere and yet we were able to take less time to manage and interpret the data. And that we did by end-to-end collaboration. We leveraged a whole lot of AI ML to make decisions out of the data, to run analytics out of the data. And we have governance around our data. We have to ensure that that data is secure, it's transparent, it's well-governed, and it is managed properly. So this is how AWS does that. And this is how what our learnings from Amazon.com, we have made that into services that we now provide to our customers. If you look at the picture on the right-hand side, that's the process data flows through. It gets ingested through a multiple set of sources. It gets transformed, harmonized, so that data can be connected, various pieces of data coming from different sources. We leverage AI ML to understand the data, to interpret the data, we leverage historical data to be able to make decisions. We build insights, recommendations, and then we re-itrate that AI ML model to make it better based on our understanding and learnings till it becomes a business strategy. And all that is done within the framework of what AWS provides you of quality and integrity of data, governance. We give you transparency of how your data flows through the systems. So when we're talking about data coming in and out and in and out, that's the transparency we provide you. We ensure that there is security as the data goes through multiple systems, multiple personas, multiple countries and continents, compliance to the different regulations around the data, cybersecurity, ethical usage of AI models. We build models, but we also enable you as a customer to ensure that there is ethical usage of that data. And last but not the least, we don't just come in and help you manage the data, provide you the framework, we train you. We ensure that as we walk away, you have the knowledge to be able to manage and govern the data for your business going forward. And we have a lot of success with a lot of customers. Some of these customers you probably know. There are a lot more customers that I could not put on this particular slide. DTDC is the parcel and career company in India. They wanted to launch a new mobile app. And they wanted to track end to end track their first mile and the last mile. Which again caused an explosion of data and they came to us to ask us for our help in enabling that. We've worked with Purolator for a huge volume of data. You read the other partners. We worked with US Post when COVID hit. And within two days, we build them a website for ordering COVID vaccines and delivering COVID vaccines within two days, 54 million COVID vaccines. So we have these frameworks that we enable our customers to track the data and enable their digital transformation. So my request to you, I still have three more minutes. My request to you is if you have any questions, if you as a customer would like to explore use cases or work with AWS to figure out how you enable your digital transformation, work with us. My contact name is over there. I have colleagues in the audience that can help you as well. The way we work with you is we enable you.  And then we walk backwards from it to build use cases, to build the steps that will let you go to the roadmap or the goal. And then once we prove success, we make that into a flywheel to grow from there. That's all, thank you very much. Perfect, thank you very much. Brody, collecting data, administering data, processing data, this all creates a lot of uncertainty. Isn't that also an opportunity maybe for the posts that are leaders in trust? Absolutely, what I thought I'd start with is just a few slides on what's going on in the industry from our future of post research that we do every year. What you can see here is what's happened in the last two years from a revenue and profitability standpoint. One of the things that we're finding is that there's a lot of additional ambiguity in the industry right now as postal operators are working through the sizable changes that occurred on the mail side with mail volume declines and on the parcel side with parcel volume growth. And these networks are right sizing. What you see on the revenue side is that there was a shift from positive to neutral. And this data comes from right at the beginning of this year, Q4 of last year, Q1 of this year, we saw marked slowdown in parcel volumes declines in most geographies that we look at. And so that's that transition that you see of revenue from positive revenue the previous year to neutral. It's a little different on the profitability side. What you see is that it shifts from positive to negative on the profitability side as parcel volume slowed down and the networks struggled to right size to catch up with that adjustment in volumes. What we found as this year has progressed is that volumes have stabilized and have come back in a few geographies. So we're seeing flat to slightly down in most geographies with a few exceptions where we're seeing slightly positive parcel volumes. The other thing that we're finding is on the mail volume side, mail volume decline is about 200 basis points higher than it was pre-pandemic in most of the geographies that we study. So if you were at 5% pre-pandemic, you're at 7% mail volume decline now. What all that's doing is creating headwinds in the industry and some additional instability in postal organizations as they struggle to right size their networks and return to profitability. When we ask the question of what's the biggest impact happening in your business today, what you'll find is that if you go back a couple years, the big winner is kind of right in the middle there which was increased parcel volumes creating capacity challenges. Capacity challenge was the challenge during the pandemic. What you see is that it's gone back to pre-pandemic norms and mail volume declines has become the biggest impact that postal organizations are dealing with today. What I find interesting is that you can see a split 50-50 really. Half of the posts are saying that following volumes are creating revenue challenges and the other half of the posts are saying that they still have capacity challenges. This is the first time we've seen this level of variation in the industry where it's hard to point to a global trend. It's very regional. Southeast Asia for example, volumes falling fairly dramatically. Some of the places in Europe that we're looking at, volumes are climbing slightly. So it's still a very widely varying situation and it really depends on your geography. The other two that I want to spend just a little bit of time on are right at the bottom. Increased same-day delivery, you've got a low response rate but continues to be a high priority as we talk with retailers and then returns got an even lower rating. Returns continue to grow and every geography that we're studying returns continue to be an important element of the e-commerce ecosystem and post organizations continue to be the organizations that should dominate in this space and are paying, in my opinion, too little attention to the role that they should be playing in the return space and this chart kind of plays that out. So moving then into the kind of the trust topic what you find when we ask where post organizations see opportunity it's in trust areas, government services, prescription drug delivery, financial services and identity are four areas that are ranked well as far as where they see potential growth. It doesn't compare to what we're seeing on e-commerce. E-commerce continues to be the big growth driver. But you see that there's a play there in the middle of this data here of where the trust that a post can bring adds value to the sorts of transactions that they can be providing. And the one I want to focus on next is identity. If you look at what's happening with fraud the pandemic radically accelerated challenges with fraud and you can see some of the statistics here but it's something that needs to be addressed and we're seeing banks and e-commerce organizations in particular wanting to have different solutions out in the market. One of the important things to addressing fraud is putting a human with the home, a person to a place and that's not an easy thing to do. As we've looked at solutions that are out in the market most of them have challenges but post organizations are extremely well suited to be able to do this. Analysis that we did a few years ago off the OCR solution that Escher offers found that we could read the person and address data off the mail piece and get a database of the people and places in a country that was far more robust than what anybody else would be able to develop. Passively gathering this human to home association off of the processing that you're already doing the mail and parcels that are moving through your networks you'll see patterns in that data that nobody else can see you'll see identities in that data that nobody else can see and as you pull that data in passively then you can then layer on an active association of that data at an additional level of verification. As you look at who's talking about being able to use this it's certainly the e-commerce companies but human to home is important for many of the programs that government organizations offer. The social welfare programs, voting, school districting are some of the important where it's you've got to have that right association. The use of that mail stream to passively gather that association the data that you're already gathering and then the additional validation that you could layer onto that would provide a solution in the market that doesn't exist anywhere today and is in high demand as we talk with these government and e-commerce entities. Another area where post organizations I think should be playing a bigger role from a trust and security standpoint is in financial services. As you look at what's happening in the banking industry today and the reduction in the physical footprint one of the things that we're finding is that posts are well suited to fill that void and post organizations that are launching these new financial products you can see here the types of products that they're offering are benefiting from that change in the dynamic that change in what's happening in the physical footprint of places where you can get cash. Escher is a tech company at its heart a logistics tech company and because we work with post organizations broadly we're often approached by fintech organizations and they have a simple proposition. They say there are occasional times when we need to be able to get cash into people's hands or cash out of people's hands. Grandma wants to give $100 to each of her grandkids. They need fractional physical and post organizations are the prime organizations to be able to offer that fractional physical to a fintech. Again, leveraging the trust and security that they offer with the brand and proximity that they have. With that, you can see the QR code here if you want to get the full report if you just scan that QR code it will allow you to enter your email address we'll send you the report and then we'll send you the updates as they're available. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much Brody. Latia, you're the next one and I mean transferring the traditional physical trust and security that most post operators have but to a digital one is not so easy. How can the UPU help in that respect? Thank you very much Bernard. My name is Latia Matata. I work at the International Bureau. I am the director of the Postal Technology Center. To answer Bernard's question, I just have one slide. I'll try to make it easy. The way I'd like to approach this is in a holistic view. Each one of these points here of course are very detailed. They touch very much on all the topics that my fellow panellists have talked about. I just want to go through each one of them saying how they strengthen our sectors in terms of digital trust and security of course building on the trust that we already have from a physical point of view. Starting with standards, we have our UPU acts treaties. They are specific regulations and articles in our convention. That means they are binding on the members related to the handling of personal data. Similarly, the International Bureau has got some obligations in terms of handling the data that we use on behalf of the postal operators. To achieve this of course we have to take the best practices. We don't let's say similar intergovernmental organization don't follow any national laws. We try to apply let's say ISO standards so similar intergovernmental standards. ISO standards are applied. We always use these standards to ensure that we are following best practices in handling data. Across the UN system too there are efforts to harmonize practices of handling data securing information. Standard basically is a heart and key of what we do and what we provide to our members. Now we go to the second point on solutions and this one I must say I can talk on forever because this is my core business. The acronyms you see there for those of you who don't know are the UPU technology that we deliver to our postal operators to help them essentially fulfill the acts and basically do the business that they know very well. They cover all the dimensions logistics, financial services customs handling and postal payments so I was happy to see many orders listed there. Now these solutions I'm very very pleased to say are heavily and widely deployed. So IPS for example is our flagship product it's used by 196 postal operators including PostNL since we're here they committed back in 2008 to use IPS have invested heavily into it it's part of their core international mail processing and all their investment has gone into the product and been made available to all the rest of the postal operators. So this sort of cooperative model has worked well for us as the UPU. Similar to CDS it is used by it's for customs handling it is used by 136 postal operators. DPS is a very creative when we have our names DPS means domestic postal system and it's all about a solution for the domestic market. Understanding our core business is international the network nevertheless has to go through your national territory so we were asked by our members to build a domestic solution. UPIP is basically our new platform for instant payment. Now because of this heavy deployment we are now starting to see ourselves as a platform. A platform combining all these solutions to help our operators to do all the postal business in synchrony all at once. Now what that means is the next slide there the next point partnerships. We do realize that our postal operators don't work in a vacuum they work a lot with the private sector we are very interested in making sure this technology seamlessly integrates with the solutions from their partners and our partners. What we are doing here is we have a clear interoperability strategy we have exposed in public the APIs of all these solutions and now we are going forward with the next level we want to certify these solutions and anybody who is in the commercial space and they want to integrate with these solutions we will receive a certification from us. Now what this means for them and I hope there are more private operators here is that now you will get a stamp from the UPU saying you are certified and you can use this to access this large deployment footprint that I have just spoken about. Going down to postal data I think you know all about that massive amounts of data the point I want to make here is what is happening in the CAD space, electronic advanced data. What is happening here is the part of trust is getting stronger because before a postal item can leave the origin country it has to have been accepted by the customs authority in the destination country including transit because of the ICS-2 release to situation. What does that mean? We are strengthening the trust we are strengthening the security of postal items moving through the supply chain. Now with all that data we are also working on advanced analytics so quality of service has always been a key part of the work we are doing there are very many extensive programs to analyze the data provide reports and help our operators improve. The last point I need to mention it just like everybody else AI machine learning these are things that we are doing. I'm happy to say that not later than three weeks ago we added to our global track and trace solution the ability to have a predictive delivery date. Now this is very big for us we work on a national scale international scale so all our small posts so about 64 of them have integrated our global track and trace solution into the UPO website into their corporate network. We are now able to offer their customers a predictive date of delivery something I would say mostly the advanced posts do. I'm running out of time I will be quick. Now centralizing the interconnection between us and any private operator is networks we have our platform for exchange of data called postnet we are working very closely with carriers first and customs security between the postal operators and airlines so again this is a core central part of the work we are doing. Finally something that is new and I refer to some of the questions raised yesterday I kept quiet about it is we have as the UPU realized long time ago that securing the online space is critical so we are the only UN organization across the entire UN system that actually has a sponsored top level domain in place and we did this back in 2012. It has not moved maybe it was not its time but I'm very pleased to say now it's its time I think we all recognize we need to secure ourselves and we are working now to open it up if I may use that expression and make it available more to the private postal sector and make it easier for our own designated postal operators to build so this is all about frameworks of having first of all security best practices of your website of your e-commerce site but it's also a brand just like your customers appreciate and understand your physical presence since 1874 what we want to do with the dot post domain is achieve the same online so if you close your eyes for a bit you imagine amazon.com amazon.post if you go right now to post nl.post there is a page they are partners of this they have done this right from the beginning we have ethio.post which has committed its entire online strategy to using the dot post domain so we are starting to accelerate on this end and I'm sure this will really strengthen our let's say our ability to provide trust and security for the postal sector thank you very much I look into the audience whether there are already some questions just think about your questions whenever you are ready just raise your hands please we have seen so many new technologies lately popping up I mean IOT many posts are working in the area already in one way or another you have AI of course many use cases you have blockchains many new technologies that are appearing and already here already but how do they impact the way we perceive and can establish trust and security who wants to start maybe who has an answer to that I think that we need to also trust and security means that you are comfortable with the process and as we see technology advance we are seeing a bit widening gap between the older generation and younger generation as we go forward with the AI solutions and we come up with all of these clever ways how to deliver the parcels then actually we see that the trust of elder generation the post in the light of these innovations and developments decrease and it decreases because they don't understand what is being offered what is being done and I think that this is one of those things that we need to be on that age we need to keep developing advancing so to make sure that we cater for the future and we come up with state of thought solutions but we also need to remember that post has to serve all of them that means from young to old and we also need to make sure that we don't leave behind some of the generations as we proceed on this path if I may add to that so we often when we trust and security we often think that there is a tool that will protect the data right but trust and security in data also means quality of the data data coming from so many different places is that good data is that harmonized and cleansed so that something can be made out of that data so as as the postal operators start moving towards their digital organization as they engage in bringing in more and more different sources of data what will be very important in being able to do something with it is in getting that data in interpreting that data in building models or leveraging AI ML to give us guidance and recommendations from that data and then be able to take action around it so that's to I wanted to call out that sometimes we always think that trust and security in data means I can box it into something and I can protect the data trust and security in data also means good data good quality data coming from a whole bunch of sources as I reflect on it a little bit interesting to do a poll with these new technologies that are coming out their data and identity is more secure and who feels that it's less my sense is that everybody would say less and part of the challenge is the technologies that protect that data or keep the integrity of that data are lagging I think there's more attention needed there if I look at one of the things that we do our retail solution is built on a distributed ledger technology which means we've never lost a transaction it's never been breached it's never we never lost one it operates offline so if the network goes down it's all this goodness how do you take a technology like that and start using it in different functions to add the security and trust and I love what Ibti talked about that it's more than just protecting the data but it's making it real the last thing I'll say on that is if you think about where AI is headed often the answer you get is counter intuitive and I wonder how many times that's because the data is bad even more important there when you're going to start putting trust in the answer to have trust in the data maybe a different take on it because it's a perception on technology what we see is of course demands from all other place to do something and we always try to find the least common denominator to actually give a solution that could work in as many different environments so the keyword I'd use is simplicity I saw it was spoken about very much yesterday customer experience which for me is simplicity is the solution helping the customer do what it used to do simpler and if they have that then behind you can have very very expensive and advanced AI you can have very very expensive solutions but what happens is a repeat use and that needs simplicity so that's what we try at least from what we do at the International Bureau is give simple solutions thank you so the members can easily adopt and implement them now you said something you have various types of people I mean there is a part of the society that loves and embraces new technologies so no question with regard to that even though they might perceive there is maybe they think more of their data is going somewhere so it's not real as it could but still they embrace it but then you have parts of the society where it's not at all this I mean you said there are people that cannot really deal with new technologies but how do you bring them along because they are an opportunity to do new technologies you implement them you deploy them and I believe there is a certain part of the population which trusts you less I mean that can't be good either how do you deal with that that's a really good question like when we think about the society we always have hipsters so omnivore was the first post-operate in the world to implement automatic puzzle machines in 2010 so we were one of those pioneers who started to try to make a change and we saw that in the first three to four years time hipsters, only the ones who wanted to look cool even though they didn't at that time the functionality wasn't what it is today then came the mass market and then the lackers only came around during the Covid and they would have never came along but Covid basically pushed them to make to use that and all of a sudden they figured it out but what I mean is that we as we go towards the AI and obviously that is the way to go forward we still need to make sure that we cover all of the needs at some moment in Omnivore we thought that the only solution out there is the automated puzzle machine it's convenient, it's easy it's just about spread how much we can put around there but when we talk about the trust and security in the service then all of a sudden we start getting what about the disabled, what about the blind what about the people who cannot use it or people who actually want to use cash because they don't have any of the credit cards and they want to have the customs declared items from China in the IOSS process set up in cash so you have to, even though the mainstream is going to develop there you cannot ignore the latter part and that's I think one of the challenges of UPU why that's why I don't envy Letty that UPU has to cater for the needs of Switzerland and Estonia and at the same time someone in Africa in a civil war or et cetera so that the system is the same and that is I think one of the biggest challenges how to keep these both sides intact and both feel that they have a trust and security in the service they're getting within AWS, Amazon we have a little bit different perspective as our business has been growing we have been leveraging cutting edge technology to support our business instead of bringing in humans sorry for that and within AWS what we do is we take that cutting edge technology and make it available to our customers so what we want to within AWS do is yes there are parts of the society that is not as open to leveraging the cutting edge technologies but our goal is to show you the art of the possible and our goal is to or our hope is that we make it habit forming for you till some time back I used to not order my food on Uber Eats today I do not want to go to a restaurant unless I'm going with friends I order my food on Uber Eats that has become habit forming I did not know that food could be ordered on Uber Eats but I know that now so that's the perception we bring is we leverage cutting edge technology we make it simple using Lati's words we make it simple and then we work with our customers to make that habit forming show them what can be done with technology Brody go for it so I think we should not forget at least the one I speak about the postal sector I speak about the UP itself we have the stats we get on a yearly basis on the number of postal employees and this is I think the last one is 5.3 million if we put all the postal staff majority of them are the posties the operational people and they are physically moving the mail they want these processes to be simple when they are interacting with technology they want it to be simple now asking them to forego certain or use more complex technology is a no go so we do hear a lot of complaints on how difficult it is to change things the regulations in the UPU it's for the simple reason that the base operations don't change if there is anything that touches that you could have a disjointed network or basically the mail will not move smoothly between Michigan and somewhere in the middle of the Sahara it will not happen so what we try to do is introduce I would say using your word using your name of a company Omni solution it is possible to do it this way but you still have the option to print a paper you still have an option to print a label you still have an option and so on and so forth it is difficult it is painful but in this way we are able still to maintain this homogeneity of the entire network so it's basically an omni solution approach to your question this reflects also on this morning we had a discussion and it was around also cultural regional differences in a sense of how you perceive trust and how you perceive security and I mean you just mentioned that the UPU systems they work in Switzerland and Estonia well in some other regions developing regions where you don't have the same technology or maybe even a civil war so where the situation is completely different so exactly one size doesn't fit all but how do you cater with that how can you deal with that one size doesn't fit all you have a world with so many differences with so many different perceptions and expectations towards trust and security how can you manage that in a global network and then this comes back to what I said in my presentation that my expectations towards UPU perhaps is that it's not so much about UPU's main role in my view is not to distribute about the pricing which is usually the most biggest issue if someone has large volumes you can make a bilateral agreement but it's more about the standards which also you brought up in the presentation but I would also like UPU to look into the standards more into also the commercial field what I said that for example if we had one API integration because I mean we have 100 plus integrations with different partners each of them with different completely set up however the events behind them all the same made available for pickup made the pickup customs clearance arrival to the hub etc we all know all of these events why does it mean that we have to make hundreds of integrations etc so if we were able to standardize the same as that phones are all different but we have certain standards we have inside EU that the roaming package is the same you have the type C charging network etc so we should be looking towards standardizing the things which doesn't need necessarily the competition and then keep the competition on the pricing outside of that scope and this is what I see because that will enable us to do the trusted security part when Europe implemented the IOSS solution we tried several service providers on how to implement HS codes automatically machine learning etc but if the input there is RAID then machine cannot tell you what is inside because the RAID is not an item so it's all about making sure that the chain of data remains intact sorry there's a risk I might speak a lot by now how we're trying to let's say strengthen the trust is actually seeing let's say if I may use the word take a leadership role not by me but say I'll say by our director general but also my fellow directors because it is recognized that the UPU of course as an intergovernmental organization has a neutral position we take a neutral position therefore if we use our presence or our logo or our identification and say this is something that is vetted by the UPU it is in conformance with the standards of the UPU you can use that to leverage on the trust of the customer and that's why I spoke briefly on this tech cert it's a technical certification because we think it is valuable for the commercial sector to receive this and help them to access new markets or at least to lower the barrier of integration so it's all about let's say identity and leveraging on let's say our neutral position thank you and that's where if I may add to it that's where vendors like us can work with you because while we understand that there is different requirements for everybody different countries different organizations there has to be some basic infrastructural standardization that needs to be done to make the volume be available right and beyond that there are differentiators for each of the individual requirements then we work with to configure and deliver to that but there has to be that base standardization that we can work with you so I mean the Amazon is part of the consultative committees as a member of the UPU today to provide a UPU so this is a concrete expectation that you have with your involvement within the UPU system to drive those standards to drive these common approaches trust and security in a global network in a global post-leaker system maybe also Brody you want something to add to these points to your original question of standardization uncertain that's an attainable or even advisable goal in where we're at today if you could go back 100 years was it you could what was the statement from Ford you could get a Ford in any color you wanted as long as it was black how would that play today I to this personalization concept I showed up at a hotel the other day and they had a coke sitting on the table that had my name on it and I was intrigued by this so I went and asked the manager I'm like alright that was nice right coke had my name printed on it why'd you pick coke and they said because the analytics say that that's your favorite drink and anybody on my team knows if you go to dinner I'm going to order a coke that's the sort of personalization that we're coming to expect and it requires the right data that's clean and there's standards that have to be applied to that but I don't know that this kind of one size fits always ever going to fly in the world again so there is kind of there's standards that enable interoperability and that's key as I think is where the UPU has done a great job and probably can do more at dinner last night Charles was talking about how if posts work together they would have the best network in the world but it's been a goal for a long time and for whatever reason barriers keep getting in the way that's what's needed you're never going to make SwissPost and Estonia and Namibia all work the same but if you can get the standards that enable the interoperability then you've got trust between the organizations and then you get a different value proposition and I think that's a better objective than make it all common make it all the same I don't think we'll get there before you answer maybe to his questions once you were told in the hotel that it's your favorite drink and that's why it was there how did you feel did you feel now trust I was freaked out by it I did not tell them that they had figured it out somehow I have no idea how and so my first reaction was wow that's personalization and my second reaction was wow what else do they know about me exactly what else do they know exactly any questions from the audience now nobody just you're all happy with what it is and Dave all being so very clear please Latias there is the world is not flat if I may use that expression and a very good demonstration of that is a dressing system each country each village might have its own way of reaching that citizen so what we face at the UPU of SCOS we try to standard that we have an S42 standard try to bring some harmony but it is an attempt it is not a success so when we build systems or at least when we try to find solutions as I said we find the least common denominator but acknowledge that the world is not flat so what we are facing is a huge huge undertaking it changes every day people move around a lot there are some excellent solutions in terms of identity management that we like to work on together and I enjoyed the fact that Esha is looking at identity management to help the posts identify the customers wherever they are in the world again privacy issues aside customers feel more comfortable not feel that they are being watched but also feel that they can be reached it would be very very good from a trust point of view thank you okay let's move maybe to e-commerce because this is really the area where everybody is doing something I mean as an individual everybody is buying now at the end or very often on the internet you share your data and that is very common and the data again is shared with whoever does the delivery the logistics behind it so a postal operator maybe hopefully and so all these kind of data questions create a lot of concern of course so there's the concern of a lot of people still out there okay what are they doing many many stakeholders are involved what are they doing with my data and of course then you have also brands that keep a good reputation so how can e-commerce platforms how can carriers and together mitigate those concerns of e-commerce shoppers I think that what you mean mostly is like how do you avoid data breaches or yes how do we avoid data breaches but also how do you make people feel safe so I think it's both I think it's the we are developing we're one of the leaders in the last mile delivery so we have positioned ourselves there and some of the countries there are quite challenging and the challenge comes from not from the last mile but people of Kyrgyzstan trust Kyrgyz Post because that's their provider however someone from Amazon might not have the same sense of security though it's a local provider there and this is where we as omnivore come in in terms of the assurance and setting and basically saying that yes we provide our assurance that they are up to the standard that data doesn't leak but obviously the countries are very different and also the amount of data for example some of the countries in order to do the customs clearance you need to also list down your parents you need to list down their birth year's addresses etc their last year's incomes etc so there is a lot of input which might seem normal in that country because they are working in that ecosystem which is very strange for anyone coming from US or Europe for that matter so the challenge challenge is to have that trust for the local regulation that we need to comply with the local regulation that's also been one of the biggest hindrances of large incomes going into developing markets and obviously we work with the local regulators to try to ease the restrictions but the aim why they are doing that and we've been talking with local customs is to minimize the customs fraud and that goes back to this trust and security and that's why I mentioned before that if we would have one universal standard it would be very difficult for anyone to ignore it and say no we don't provide it because if they actually had a chance to receive the actual value of transaction they wouldn't care for all of that the rest of that but it is about the trust and security and I think that at the moment you are working on that case by case basis but we do need a universal solution at certain stage So Brody had shared in his slide right mail business is going down e-commerce business is going up more of us are ordering stuff and more of us have requirements of collecting a whole bunch of data and giving visibility to it which does mean that a lot of data is coming in which does mean agree with you there has to be some sort of standardization and I don't mean standardization from the fact of that everybody has to use the same data but there has to be some standardization to be able to have that trust and security but beyond that there are expectations there is data and what we within AWS and Amazon are doing is we are building that customers trust in the data by leveraging technology by leveraging some of these if I may say one of the technologies is AIML it could be IoT it could be robotics bringing in technology and showing to the customers that there is security governance around those technologies they are not going astray pulling in the data and sharing it with everybody right so we we work with our customers in each of these countries in each of these markets to be able to leverage the tools and services we have to build that customer trust around the data because the reality is each of the customers that we work with have customers that have absolutely increasing exploding needs for leveraging that data I can give a very simple example I live in Switzerland and I must tell you when it comes to e-commerce a more comfortable dealing with SwissPost to buying something from their website because I know SwissPost they come to my door every day however if I was to go to not pointing figures Bukina Faso post I would not be so comfortable ordering something to come to me for the fact that it's a different country I don't know that post so at the UPU I mean I think Nermin mentioned it briefly the ambition to have a global e-commerce I really like to work with you on this to find a commonality to interconnect e-commerce sites this is one ambition we had five years ago and we tried to work on this to interconnect it doesn't matter commercial, postal but basically have the customer experience for international items become local that was the key so same concept I'm now dealing with SwissPost I live in Switzerland but on the SwissPost website are products from Bukina Faso that I want and then I just have to deal with SwissPost SwissPost has to deal with Bukina Faso post and that's their problem they just have to make it very very good for me so this is one direction we would really like to work especially with the commercial sector to enable thank you I look again at the audience if there is somebody we have been talking about all these new technologies but not concretely about the technologies what are possible technologies that provide opportunities to create more trust and security in our systems and how could they do that do you have any opinions on that Sven had in his presentation about using blockchain or the broader ledger technologies to better protect and secure the data I think is there's got to be more that's done there or more to come there as I look at the increasing sophistication of the hacking capabilities I think we'll see more of that technology adopted just to protect the data there's obviously things that could be done white hat AI sorts of things to combat the black hat AI sorts of things that are going on out there I worry that the investment profile is backward there that it's easier to steal something than protect it and so that's where the money is going at the end of the day the the challenge is always going to be the pace at which these technologies are evolving and the investment that's needed to keep pace with the protection has got to be more commonly shared there's got to be a joint investment I think this is something you could probably help with as well if I'm add to that in my perspective I think governance and transparency in addition to blockchain kind of technology right in a way blockchain does provide the governance and transparency to the data there's data coming in from various sources how do we provide access control how do we provide the transparency to ensure that our customers trust where the data is going one more thing that I'll bring up is a lot of us have started using chat GPT so gen ai is being talked at every board room and gen ai has the perspective of we all love gen ai but we don't know how data is protected because it has access to anything and everything so that the next set of investments in terms of building security and trust will be how these chat bots when they go and they pull perceptions and recommendations from a huge volume of data how is that controlled how do we protect that when I ask chat GPT or any other gen ai tool a question it doesn't go into the worldwide web and pull everything out it goes to a set of protected environment from which it pulls out that data why I mentioned before either blockchain solution or standardization just for some of you who don't know so when we dealing with 20 million parcels from China to Europe for example at this stage the parcel is graded in China when they're putting it on an airplane there is still a paper cargo manifest what is on there pretty detailed level on what are the items what are the HS codes what are the values then it's brought over to Europe then it's the same manifest then etc so you need to make sure that that truck driver doesn't get all the info that airline who's transporting for five different competitors doesn't get all of that data so you block something out and now when we finally get that manifest manifested data then actually what is actually on the manifest of the truck driver what is sent to us what they were supposed to send that what the airline said that was on the plane to make it match is to make sure that we're actually reading the same data not the different versions of the Excel which were at certain moment but actually we're going back to the same ultimate ledger and looking at the same data same item and we know where that specific item is at that stage and we're not there why because we still have regulations where airlines need to for redundancy purposes need to have two sets of papers one electronic one paper the truck something in hand because if the police etc and because of the ecosystem which doesn't support this we're still in a situation that because of that we receive in a year somewhere around 100,000 parcels which we actually have no manifested data and we're missing another 100,000 items which we have the data but and I don't see any other way to solve it then we actually have same data and we just can blur out certain fields to send but we're not cutting it but we're keeping the same one and that's where the blockchain actually comes in but I'm not saying that that's the only option but the challenge from a last mile delivery operator especially for cross border is huge and the pain is every day and it's not just us but across the board. Do you want to rector that as well? Yeah I'll use the word consolidation and to Sven's point consolidation of data is something that we've heard a lot about and also use the word specialization why I say this is at the International Bureau we are receiving a lot of alerts a lot of reports of our poor postal operators getting attacked and hacked and basically taken out of business and to that point these days a postal operators are not moved if there's no data that has been captured and sent so basically business stops so our response to this to Boris point is to specialize store the data in places where the people know how to handle this so our standard let's say cloud providers Microsoft, Amazon AWS because they know how to protect data we also help with the consolidation part so that means looking up and getting information to get the exact data you need not all of it is possible so we're bringing all the data in one place but making sure it is kept in the most secure place possible that for me is critical and then with that comes the next point on reliability that you are guaranteed when you look up this data anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet access you will get the answer you're looking for and this again requires real cloudification expertise a lot of investment but it is for me worth it to protect us from what is happening by in the world today with regards to hacking yeah, thank you you have brought up also a few examples how blockchain can help in that respect now we have been talking about blockchain I think for a couple of years already right and when you look around how many solutions you see of blockchains developed in or for the post-industry or logistics in general then you just come to the conclusion of saying well something's wrong here I mean everybody's saying about those amazing use cases smart contracts and you name it and the security that comes with it but nobody really does a lot about it at the moment so where do you see the future really of blockchain will there be a future of blockchain and when will there be maybe a breakthrough finally that we can see deployed either in UPU systems or within postal operators or for other cross-border transactions so what's the future is there a future and when can we expect this future that's a really really good one like from omniverse perspective we always said that automated postal machine is the future and then actually the future came and it became a reality and then in the mid 2015 somewhere around that everyone started saying that the next breakthrough in last mile is going to be drones we're going to see drone deliveries everything dropped off and when 2023 and I haven't seen anyone making it work and not on a large scale on it's not yet there from a real like to being able to have anyone doing 90% of deliveries or something like that and it has for niche missions and that's the same like with the blockchain that everyone keeps talking but maybe we'll find the easiest solution some QR code which will solve it etc so I don't think we should be so much focused on the technology of how but the end result what we want to achieve and once we get to that end result because I mean same as with the drone or automatic bus machine we shouldn't focus on the function of how but the aim is to make it easier for the customer to receive that parcel which ever justifies that means and I think that that's the thing if we it's like if you're alcoholic you only start working on yourself when you admit it and then you will say I have a problem and I need to solve it so we need to establish that we have a problem with the data security and we need to start working with that in order to make sure that actually the data flow from order to the delivery remains the same that we don't change that if we actually all of us say that that's a problem then we will we have the global workforce to solve that I think technology we all know technology moves faster than the rules and regulations right so blockchain did come it was a really good technology it still is but our rules and regulations did not change as you were mentioning the airline still has to have a paper manifest which is very different from the manifest that was given to the truck driver at the source original location so while rules and regulations are catching up I think technology will still move further so in my mind blockchain is more a word that is being used for integrity of data right and we call it blockchain today it could be a completely different technology tomorrow but and that's what vendors like AWS are working on is how do we provide that to ensure that that integrity of data is carried through so I don't know I don't have a crystal ball to say whether blockchain will be there but yes there will be tools that will ensure that there is integrity and there's transparency to the data that moves through your supply chain on a light note as a technology guy we always fall into the trap of building a solution and then looking for the problem in which to to solve this so to your point almost I'd say eight or nine years ago blockchain started coming up and an international bureau we brought all together all the experts in IT looked for the most conversant person on blockchain asked them to come spend a whole day understanding it asking all the questions so all our IT experts subjected this poor guy to a lot of questions to explain what is blockchain that was one big issue at the end of it we had an exercise where we asked all of them please you all experts in the UPU technologies give us solutions for that so I got a lovely excel sheet with different use cases and what a view and then we put that all together and had another brainstorming session saying what is possible and then we thought well we have some ideas from these guys let's see whether our posts will be interested and we kept that there unfortunately no interest and this is eight years ago yeah so there's a reason why I didn't say blockchain in all my presentation I think Dipty you got it perfectly right it's about trust it's about ways of ensuring the integrity of data and we spend a lot of time doing this so for me blockchain I'm waiting very patiently for a real use case we have said severally as the UPU we are more than happy to note of blockchain platforms for the simple reason that if there is indeed a situation where there is a global use case we as the UPU again intergovernmental we're in the perfect position to hold this sensitive data in a neutral legal space that is what value we can bring to our postal sector so this doesn't have to be just for designated postal operators but also for the operators and their partners so this is our positioning and we're waiting to support but we want to see this use case thank you thank you Broly do you also want to say something about this blockchain topic just what your idea about it is I don't know whether it's something that Escher is also considering or not is blockchain something that we're considering or whether you see a future like I said our retail platform is built on distributed ledger technology we're already blockchain I've been for 30 years so no it's not something we're considering we did it already okay perfect I think we are out of time already and I promised everybody so that for the afternoon session we stick to the time and to finish time we are going to have a break now 15 minutes come then back with the sustainability topic but before we leave give a big applause to our four panelists here that did a really great job thank you very much


I want to finish our extremely brief discussion of coding and data sciences and the languages that can be used by mentioning one other that's called bash. And bash really is a great example of old tools that have survived and are still being used actively and productively with new data. You can think of it this way, it's almost like typing on your typewriter, you're working at the command line, you're typing out code through a command line interface or CLI. Now, this method of interacting with computers practically goes back to the typewriter phase because it predates monitors. So before you even had a monitor, you would type in the code and it would print it out on a piece of paper. And the important thing to know about the command line is it's simply a method of interacting. It's not a language because lots of different languages can run at the command line. So for instance, it's important to talk about the concept of a shell. Now in computer science, a shell is a language or something that wraps around the computer to shell around the language that is the interaction level for the user to get things done at the lower levels that aren't really human friendly. On Mac computers and Linux, the most common is bash, which is short for born again shell. On Windows computers, the most common version is PowerShell. But whatever you do, there actually are a lot of choices. There's the born shell, there's the C shell, which is why I have a C shell right here, the Z shell, there's fish for friendly interactive shell and a whole bunch of other choices. But bash is the most common on Mac and Linux and PowerShell is the most common on Windows as a method of interacting with the computer at the command line level. Now there's a few things you need to know about this. First, you have a prompt of some kind in bash, it's a dollar sign. And that just means type your command here. Then the other thing is you type one line at a time. It's actually amazing how much you can get done with what's called a one liner program by sort of piping things together. So one feeds into the other, you can run more complex commands, if you use a script. And so you call a text document that has a bunch of things in it. And you can get much more elaborate analysis done. Now we have our tools here. In bash, we talk about utilities. And what these are are specific programs that accomplish specific tools. bash really thrives on do one thing and do it very well. There are two general categories of utilities for bash. Number one is the built ins. These are the ones that come installed with it. And so you're able to use them at any time by simply calling in their name. Some of the most common ones are cat, which is for catnate. And that's to put information together. There's awk, which is its own interpreted programming language. But it's often used for text processing from the command line. By the way, the name awk is comes from the initials of the people who created it. Then there's grep, which is for global search with a regular expression and print. It's a way of searching for information. And then there's said, which stands for stream editor. And its main use is to transform text, you can do an enormous amount with just these four utilities. A few more are head and tail that display the first or last 10 lines of a document, sort and unique, which sort and count the number of unique answers in a document, wc, which is for word count, and print f, which formats the output that you get in your console. And while you can get a huge amount of work done with just this small number of built in utilities, there are also a wide range of installables or other command line utilities that you can add to bash or to whatever program you're using. So for instance, some really good ones that have been recently developed are jq, which is for pulling in JSON or JavaScript object notation data from the web. And then there's JSON to CSV, which is a way of converting JSON to CSV format, which is what a lot of statistical programs are going to be happier with. There's real, which allows you to run a wide range of commands from the statistical programming language are in the command line as part of bash. And then there's big MLR. And this is a command line tool that allows you to access big ML's machine learning servers through the command line. Normally, you do it through a web browser and it accesses their servers remote. It's an amazingly useful program. But to be able to just pull it up when you're in the command line is an enormous benefit. What's interesting is that even though you have all these opportunities, all these different utilities, you can do amazing things and that there still is active development of utilities for the command line. So let's say this in some, despite being in one sense as old as the dinosaurs, the command line survives because it is extremely well evolved and well suited to its purpose of working with data, the utilities, both the built in and the installables are fast and they are easy. And generally, they do one thing and they do it very, very well. And then surprisingly, there is an enormous amount of very active development of command line utilities for these purposes, especially with data science.


Also, just remember that rules over time can change with regards to the capacity, what you can do with losses, carry them back, carry them forward and so on and so forth. So just remember when you're looking at losses, you wanna make sure to kinda double check. Double check the log. Where you stand with regards to the type of loss and what your capacity to do with the loss is. And again, the tax software is often a useful guide to help you with that. All right, let's do the gambling. So gambling's another common one because people might get like a form 1099G or I'm sorry, a W2G and that might come from a casino or a horse track or whatever like that. If they're gamblers and they gamble a lot, then they're probably kind of have an idea of how the gambling winnings are going to work. If you get a documentation for it like anything else, you're gonna have to report at least that amount on the tax return or you're likely to run into a problem with it. Now, can you deduct the losses? Not often because if you could deduct the losses, you'd have to deduct them on a schedule A and only some people are gonna be able to categorize for the schedule A because they're gonna be taking the standard deduction. So and the losses are typically just limited to the amount of income that you received as well. So there's a severe limitation in the amount of losses that you might be able to take. Now, if you could claim that you're a professional gambler or something and if it's a legal activity, then maybe you could do the schedule C and then have losses but obviously that's not typically the case.  You know, they win a significant amount of money at one time. That could be a shock to some people because it could have a significant impact on their taxes. So when you do that, we're gonna say, okay, gambling income possibly on a W-2. So let's say this is a W-2G. So let's say W-2G and then I'm gonna say that we had a winnings of, let's say, let's say it was significant like 30,000, right?  And so now we've got the winnings of course that are gonna be populated here and that's gonna be significant going on to the 1040. Now, just something to kind of be aware of. So obviously we're populated here on the 1040 and so our income is going up and then our taxable income is going up. I won't do it on the tax software because I think it's a fairly straightforward for our formula because I think it's fairly straightforward right here and I wanna do a couple more of these but let me just do an example. If I was to remove that and then I was to say that the wages income was, let's say they were earning 40,000 and they withheld 5,000. Now you've got 40,000, 12,950 gets us only 27,050 of income. The tax is at 3,044. If I look at my tax summary, then I'm at a highest tax bracket of 12% average 11.3. Now if I had a significant amount of gambling earnings then of that 30,000, that's gonna come as quite a shock.  So that's gonna be a significant increase. So if you get a big windfall profit for whatever reason like you won the lottery or you won a prize or you went to Vegas and won a car or something like that, if you're gonna receive that at one time, this is what needs to be taken into consideration and if you run into that classic kind of scenario of would you rather have an annuity of payments or a series of payments over the next so many years or a lump sum today, then the lump sum when you do that figure in that calculation it's better to have money today than the annuity if the payments were equal but there's also a big tax implication on it as well because if you take the money today then you're gonna be paying possibly higher rates because it's gonna push you possibly into higher tax brackets. So it's just something else to kind of consider if you have someone that runs into that kind of situation. Also, if they got a windfall amount or they got winnings they might withhold from it. Something that most people don't do but it would be smart. I mean, you might do that obviously because now if there's a significant increase to your taxes then you might have to withhold and you might have to withhold more than even your marginal tax bracket before in order to be okay because now you're gonna be taxed at your highest tax bracket which now in this case got pushed up to 22% so in the form 1040 page two then we'd have our withholdings here from the W-2s and then other withholdings the other 5,000 was withheld here. Then we got the cancellation of debt. Now this one's often a shocker for people as well because if you get cancel of debt you didn't actually receive money so people often don't see it as income but obviously if you owed someone money legally and then they said you don't have to pay me that's kind of like they gave you money and then you gave it back to them, right? They canceled debt so that would be an income so unless there's a rule that says the government it's kind of like the government it's the same standard rule for income unless there's an exception which there often could be because most of the time when debt cancellation happens it's gonna be because people are insolvent incapable of paying the debt then you would have to include it in income so what you'd wanna do is have the 1099C is what you would receive you're not gonna see that all the time but if you see it you say okay it's a 1099 so I would think I would have to include that which would include it in our income line on schedule one and if I have to include it it would pull over to the form 1040 and then it would pull in here and now our income has going up and so on and so forth. Now next we have the foreign earned income exclusion from form 2555 and again that's more of a kind of specialty area so if you have people like I say if you're a professional tax preparer you might specialize in people that are in the same state and that might be some cheaper in some ways as well to do the tax preparation and get software for it or people that are in multiple states or possibly people that have income from multiple countries obviously when you have different taxes from different areas there could be a possibility for double taxation and the United States could have agreements with other governments in order to not have a situation of double taxation and whatnot and then you could dive into basically the detail on that possibly by going to the form 2555 which is right here and then you can look at the instructions on the irs.gov if you wanna dive into this in more detail and dive into that in more detail as well so I won't go into a lot of detail on the example here but we might maybe we'll go into it more in a future presentation but let's go back to the schedule one.