Earth Class Mail, Swiss Post Partner for Online Postal Mail Service

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Swiss Post and Earth Class Mail Corp. (ECM) today announced a strategic partnership in which Switzerland’s national postal operator will license Earth Class Mail’s industry-leading online postal-mail delivery platform to introduce to its customers under the venerated Swiss Post brand.

“Swiss Post is already a world leader in extracting value from the document inside the envelope; we digitize millions of pages per year of our customers’ incoming documents”

Earth Class Mail’s platform lets customers securely receive, read, and manage their postal mail over the Internet, at any time and from any location. It also enables licensees like Swiss Post both to co-brand the unique web-based user experience and, critically, to employ ECM’s proprietary back-end automation technology for managing large inventories of cached envelopes, and scanning mail contents with extraordinary security and confidentiality assurance.

During the initial pilot phase Swiss Post will provide the service to corporations, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, small businesses, and individual customers from all over the world who seek mail service or addresses in Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. After the pilot, Swiss Post expects to roll out online postal mail in all countries in which Swiss Post International has a presence, including Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the U.S.

Earth Class Mail service will bring significant cost reductions and productivity improvements to Swiss Post’s enterprise customers, as well as convenience and mobility to small businesses and residential consumers who prefer to receive the majority of their postal mail in digital, not physical, form. Swiss Post itself will be able to achieve cost savings – and boost the environmental sustainability – by drastically reducing the amount of fuel required to make physical deliveries (especially to rural areas, foreign-based NGO workers, and expats).

“We are thrilled to be working with Swiss Post as the first national postal operator to offer Earth Class Mail,” said Earth Class Mail CEO Ron Wiener, “not only in its home country but in the many other countries in which Swiss Post’s distinguished brand for precision, security, and reliability is already so well-known. Swiss Post has shown once again why it is indeed one of the most innovative posts in the world.”

Illustrating the significance of Earth Class Mail’s technology to Swiss Post’s vision of its future, Swiss Post has created a separate unit, based in Zurich, to manage the new venture. Benoit Stroelin of Swiss Post Solutions has been tapped to head the new unit and is expected to begin serving new customers in January, 2009.

“We are excited to be the first post to move forward. The Internet and digital content are here to stay. Paper Mail will always be an important part in customer communication, but we intend to augment our traditional mail delivery by growing with the media our mail-receiving customers are asking for,” said Frank Marthaler, Member of the Executive Management Team of Swiss Post.

“Swiss Post is already a world leader in extracting value from the document inside the envelope; we digitize millions of pages per year of our customers’ incoming documents,” Frank Marthaler added. “Earth Class Mail’s exclusive Recipient Choice and storage-and-retrieval capabilities allow us to expand this lucrative and fast-growing business by going beyond the unified, pre-permissioned mail streams we normally scan for enterprise customers to process 100% of their incoming mail for all their employees. We’re equally excited that we can now offer the same empowering service at economical rates to small businesses and even individual customers such as road warriors and multiple-home owners, whether they live in one of the countries we operate in or outside of them.”

About Earth Class Mail

Earth Class Mail’s system digitizes envelopes at midstream of the delivery process, presenting two-sided color images of incoming envelopes to customers via email and in customers’ secure online accounts. Then, for each new mail item, customers can use Earth Class Mail’s patent-pending Recipient Choice™ technology to have the item opened and the contents confidentially scanned for secure online viewing, or to have it shredded, archived, delivered to the right desk, transferred to another person without need of inter-office mail systems, or forward-shipped to another location without delay.

Earth Class Mail™ (www.earthclassmail.com) provides and licenses to posts and mail services vendors the only online postal-mail service designed and suitable for individuals, small businesses, large enterprises, government agencies, and the military. Customers in more than 175 countries currently access and manage their mail online, 24x7, for benefits ranging from mobility and convenience or a business presence at a fraction of the cost of an executive suite to cost savings and productivity. For enterprises and government agencies, Earth Class Mail digitizes paper mail at its entry point, injecting it directly into an organization’s electronic workflow and saving 75% of typical document lifecycle costs. The company is headquartered in Seattle.