Paper mail and the dark ages
Sun 21st October 2007, 3.03 pm
We live in an age of high-speed communication. Nearly everyone I could ever want to talk to is a user of email or Facebook and this is a very easy way to stay in touch with people.
So what happens to paper mail? My paper mailbox continues to receive several items a week which are, 99% of the time, one of two things: (a) paper spam advertising products, properties and pizza or (b) depressing stuff like bills and statements.
Why do the big companies like banks and utility boards continue to send me their mail in paper form? If they moved to email I can see the following advantages:
- I get told when I have new emails, whereas I have to poll my mailbox (this is getting to be a once-a-fortnight operation for me now).
- Emails are much easier to manage, logistically speaking. I always end up with a huge pile of papers sitting around in the house whereas with emails I can just drop a tag or two on them and archive them away to be easily retrieved at a later date.
- Email systems are arguably easier to manage at their end too, since everything can be connected together much more easily.
- Email is a lot cheaper than paper.
- Email is much better for the environment.
And what disadvantages are there? I can only think of two:
- Not everyone has email, so it would need to be optional - and that means managing two systems at once.
- I can't sign things with my handwritten signature online. But that's hardly the most secure option anyway, is it? And I very rarely need to sign anything I am sent in the post.
So are those two reasons really important enough to keep almost all(1) the utility companies and banks in the dark ages?
Or is it just technophobia and resistance to change? Why aren't there any progressive companies out there? I'm sure they'd get the custom of many just for these services, especially if they were making savings they could pass on to their customers.
(1) OK, Halifax now send me my statements by email, but they still send me loads of other crap by post. My ISP (Nildram) sends me my statements by both post and email, ridiculously.
Tagged as:
personal
mail
email
paper
bills
finance
Operating at caffeine mark 3
I'm feeling a bit procrastinaty
I'm singing Suoer Furry Animals - Valet Parking
Pete
on Sun 21st October 2007, 9.17 pm
Really, banks should just keep a list of transactions and let you peruse them and export them as CSV files, or possibly even an RSS/Atom feed. Monthly statements are a relic of the age of paper and should be made obsolete.
