USPS' Seaver Sees Cases for Autonomous and Drone Delivery

Postal Service. And I was looking at doing some research about the United States Postal Service, and I was surprised to find that if this were a private company last year, it would have been the thirty ninth biggest company in

the Fortune five hundred corporations, which is impressive. And with us to give us a little bit of more perspective on both the company and the broader market for shipping and frankly, making mail relevant in an era where people are hooked to their phones, is Kristin Siever, chief Information Officer and executive vice president of the United States Postal Service, and she joins us uh here now, so you know, Kristin, one thing that we've been hearing a lot about is

the importance to sort of transform, uh, the way people think about mail, the way that they track it, the way that they observe it and experience it. What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge in the year ahead as you sort of look out, try to make it modern but also catered to nostalgia and you know, also uh the amazonification of our world absolutely well, you know, I think one of our greatest challenges is

going to be to keep pace. We've done a lot of work, as you'll see at the National Postal Forum, UH in building technologies and platforms to track mail, to provide value to mail UM. But our challenges to keep that mail relevant, to work with our customers to help them grow their businesses, and to work as every industry he has to do right now at an incredible pace to keep up and leverage these technologies to the best extent.

How difficult is it? I was just looking at the US Post Services UH income statement recent income statement, UH, and there was a four hune seventy four million dollar year of your decline in the second quarter, and it was in large part due to having to pre fund seventy five years of retiree health benefits and how much of that is a pressure on being able to adapt to the changing environment. Yeah, the Postal Service faces significant pressure when it comes to our finances and and how

we're run. And we really have three things that we're trying to focus on. The first is for the Postal Service to adapt quickly and to manage its operation. Uh, to react to declining volumes, but also to compete where volumes are increasing. Right, so that's quite a challenge. Are the two challenges are legislative and regulatory and uh, we have a positive bill that came out of committee for postal reform that's really important to us. What's the what's

the substance of it. The substance of the Postal Reform bill is basically allows us to address our retiree health benefit There you go issue with integrating medicare, allows us to use postal service demographics instead of federal government demographics everythink about the postal Service. We have workers all over the United States in um varying income levels. It allows us to take back some of the exigent price increase, and it also gives us a little bit of flexibility

for some new products and services. That we're excited about. Well, so, since we all talk about Amazon so much and Amazon is just decimating the entire retail sector. As what people have been saying, Um, do you find that the US Postal Service is able to keep up from a technological point of view and being able to deliver all of the boxes? And can you give us a sense of how much the just sheer volume of packages has increased

over the past few years. Yeah, we've had double digit increase in package volume year over year for the last three years. But the thing that's been great about the postal services that we have the delivery muscle deflects that we go to every house, we go to every business, and it's really been an opportunity for us to showcase our strength what we've been doing for over two forty years.

But aren't there a lot more competitors because people are looking and saying, wow, this is the future, right, this is the reality is that you're gonna be able to order something, pick something up, and then it's going to come to your home. And so they're going to be some probably shippers and delivery companies they're gonna try to compete. Absolutely. Um, So one of the advantages we have is we've already built out our network UH, and we leverage that network.

The other thing is, even with competition, which is fierce, but we still deliver more e commerce packages than any of the provider in the country. UH. And we will continue to leverage our brand, our trusted presence, and everybody's business and community UH to compete and to win for that package delivery. We were talking earlier about drones. Are those on your radar? They have to as this chief

information officer, absolutely and I get that question a lot. Okay, So, so how do you for see drones playing into the United States Postal Services business plan in the near future. Well, I think for us, what's important is we have many use cases for delivery. Right. We deliver in urban areas, we deliver in rural areas. We deliver in the Grand Canyon. So maybe there's maybe the dropdown packages into the into the Colorado River go down and we've had delivery on

burrows into the Grand Canyons. That might be a possible use case of drone delivery for the Postal Service. Right. There are some places that are hard to get to UH, and we definitely foresee um uses like that but we can also use it to survey our own infrastructure. There's many different use cases. So what we're doing is staying in touch with the technology, staying in touch with the regulations UH, and really scrubbing our use cases to see

where our best UH fit's gonna be. You know, we've talked about how German postals, the German Postal Service in particular has looked at autonomous driving vehicles to help reduce costs and increase the delivery predictability. Has that been on your radar at all? Absolutely? We we have some efforts with autonomous working with academic institutions UH as far as what would be the use case, how would we use

it in the postal service UM? For us, you know, one of the things is we have such a significantly large fleet, so over two hundred and seventy thousand vehicles, so that have to be driven and maintained throughout throughout the country to deliver the mail every day, and now we deliver seven days a week. So we definitely foresee that we'll have use cases for autonomous vehicles, whether it's in actual delivery or we're also a huge logistics provider.

We have to get the mail from across the country. So what how is much? How much has the ratio between UH letters and packages changed? I imagine that once upon a time there are more letters and fewer packages, and now it has reversed. Right, It hasn't fully reversed. Oh No, letters are still the predominant product that we have. But basically as letters are declining, packages are increa using. So we haven't crossed that great divide of where total

letter volume is less than packages. But you know, the decline and letter volume is concerning UM and that's why we have to compete for the package business and and continue to deliver for the American public. What's going to be the number one technological advancement in the next year

for USPS. I think the number one advancement that will be able to leverage is our advanced analytics platform UH to continue to provide value to the mail but also to find ways to enhance our own business UH and to find those opportunities that might allow us to reduce costs, might allow us to produce new products. We put a lot of investment into that over the last three years,

and now that's finally coming to fruition. Kind of what we talked about before about being able to UH with preeminent amera, talking about how people can look and scan and see what's in their mailboxes without actually being there and possibly even use some of the UH advertisement flaws delivery. Today this year at the National Postal Forum, we have two major platforms that were leveraging and formed delivery and

informed visibility, and they really go hand in hand. So Informed Delivery is exciting because every consumer has access to it and can sign up and and you know tomorrow be looking at those images of their mail. Thank you so much for joining us, Kristin sever It was really

a pleasure to speak with you. Christin Siever is chief Information Officer and executive a vice president of the United States Postal Service here in Baltimore, Maryland, where we are broadcasting live from the National Postal for Forum right now, however, I want to bring in Jonathan Nicholson, senior reporter at Bloomberg b n A, to give us some perspective on what we've gleaned so far from President Trump's hoped budget anyway UH, and how likely it is that he is

going to get through some of what he wants. Jonathan, Thank you so much for joining us Jonathan, Uh, what have we gleaned so far about what President Trump would like to see in the budget. Well, he goes through a lot of One could argue sort of fiscal gymnastics to try and um sort of square the circle of of doing tax reform, increasing defense, UM, but also trying to get to something close to balance by the end of ten years, which has been a long term Republican

budget goal for a long time. So when doing so, basically they rely on some economic growth projections that people have some questions about, and they rely on some some deep cuts in both the non defensivescretionary and some mandatory entitlement spending programs. So I'll just go through some of the headlines that I've been looking at. Some of the information. People have said that it would hit uh, you know, all of the welfare and sort of entitlement programs other

than Medicaid, for example. It would strip away a lot more there. It would make it tougher to at some of the tax breaks for lower income individuals. It would remove uh, money for some of the offices that have been expanded under under a former President Obama in favor of bolstering defense. Right, I mean is that basically the gist. I mean, what are sort of the areas that you think are going to stick and have staying power through

all of the congressional negotiations that are inevitable. Well, it's it's actually kind of tough to see exactly, um, how much will stick and what specifically will stick. Um. Congressional Republicans are actually in many cases being very publicly neutral uh and privately, um, not very accepting of this, um real appropriate. Well, because you know, it's one thing to say that you want to balance the budget and so on, it's quite another one actually comes to actually to put

the the you know, where the rubber beats the road. Um. And so one of the things that's basically just had the House chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the Freelinghouse and put out a very neutral, uh, neither for it nor against it kind of statement just a couple of minutes ago. Or he said, yeah, our job is appropriators is to exercise the power of the purse, which is not really that newsy because that is their job, all right. So

it's basically a nonstatement. He doesn't really want to comment on it one way or another. Can we get a sense of history here with what past presidents have done when they've released their budgets or their proposed budgets. How much support do they generally get in advance from either congressmen of their same party or reach across the aisle. I mean, usually is their leg work that's done ahead of time or is this always the opening salvo? It's

it's certainly an opening salvo. I mean, you know, there's the running joke, it's it's almost clichete even joke about it. Now, is that no matter what the party mixes of who holds the who holds the Congress, who holds the White House, that when the president sends up a budget, someone will always say, quote, it's dead on arrival, um. And that

is the case with this one. The interesting thing here is that this is the first year budget that has taken this long to send it up UM, and it still is lacking the details of the tax reform proposal that they want to get to agreement on with the House and Senate Republicans. UM. And yet it's still is this's got this very The appropriators don't like the cuts to discretionary spending, The moderates don't like the cuts to some of the some of the entitlements, some of the

some of the social net programs. UM. So it's kind of interesting that usually if you do have a budget that has some degree of momentum to it, it usually is the president's first year budget. And in that sense, what we're seeing here today, particularly even with Trump even out of out of the country, while this budget is being dropped, is not nearly I think historically what we usually see, um in terms of first year budget reaction.

You know, it's funny that you mentioned that he's President Trump is at of the country, because that was my first comment to why is he doing it now while he's not here, to kind of do the rounds with it and give people an explanation of why he's so behind this particular plan, especially if people are coming out with pretty neutral expressions of you know, how they assess it. I mean, is that typical you're kind of implying, not so much. And if it's not typical, was this planned

this way or did it just sort of happen this way? Well, he was They picked this budget release date maybe about two weeks ago or so. I think by then they probably already had I would suspect at least they already had the dates locked in for the international trip that he that he's on now. UM. I do not recall the last time a president was out of the country when his budget dropped. But I also haven't checked, so I wouldn't necessarily read too much in that. But you're right.

Usually it is the day when the president says, you know, here's what we stand for fiscal fiscal policy wise. UM. And today that burden is being basically borne by mc mulvaney, who is you know, as a as a cabinet member, as an MB person, but is not, you know, not the president. UM. So so can you give me a sense, Jonathan, of what the next steps are sort of how this will move and be potentially implemented if at all. Uh.

There's sort of a two two things to watch for. Basically, the House in Senate budget committees will take this under adversement, you know, and take a look at it. They will do their own budget resolutions, UM probably in June. UM

they have to do a budget resolution. If Republicans hope to propiscate teen, if the Provolicans hope to do tax reform with Republican only votes as they plan, UM is so so what you look with for that is whether or not they set up some reconciliation structions for tax reform and for some of these spending cuts that that Trump is wanting. That's one measure of how much of

this one get actually potentially enacted into law. The other aspect of the appropriations processes, well, the appropriators marked to the one point zero six five trillion of appropriated dollars that are set up in this in this budget UM, and that seems to be a little bit closer to to being UM to happening. I think there's still a question of how they do the defense non defense mix, which they probably will not do UM as much of a mix toward defense as Trump as proposed. UM. Jonathan,

I'm looking at a headline on the Bloomberg. Trump's three point six trillion dollar budget cuts hit his own supporters hard. In other words, the people who are going to be the worst benefited to the least benefited from his current proposal are some of the people who supported him the most. Can you explain how that is? Oh, well, there's a there's a lot of political reporting about how much of his support UM was in sort of UM hard scrabble economically, UM,

tough areas West Virginia, Kentucky, so on. Uh. And in those areas, many of those many that's probing one, but a certain proportion are on say, social Security disability, which is one of the things that is proposed to be cut on this. Another is UM uh snap what used to be called food stamps. UM. So this certainly looks at those at those areas UM and and and to the extent that those are concentrated among rural rural supporters of of Trump, UH, it would indeed be certain fighting

fighting hand they want to bring in back. Jonathan Nicholson, senior reporter at Bloomberg b NA, to give us a little bit of perspective, Jonathan, what stood out to you as sort of the most important thing uh that mcmulhenney just said. There were two things that struck me. UM. One is he's kind of picked the three percent growth rate as his hill to die on UM, which I think is going to be a tough sell when he appears before the Budget Committee is uh tomorrow in the

day after UM. A lot of mainstream economists think that that's just not credible UM and uh. And so that's the fact he stucked his guns on that seems that's gonna be an issue. The other thing was he changed his wording on on Social Security to say social Security retirement. UM. Now, in the past couple of days and the previous and so on, they've been talking about they haven't they don't

touch social Security. UM. But I think when they talk when they're doing the disability insurance, which is part of the Social Security program and has included when you hear those dates about win social Security goes bankrupt and so on, it's a separate trust fund that they put the old dates Survivors Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund together called social Security and say it goes bankrupting X

y Z year or so on. UM. I think it's interesting that he sort of walked that back to say social Security retirement UM as seemingly a tacit acknowledgement of that criticism that they were trying to be evasive there. You know. I thought it was also interesting that the way that the Trump administration is going to measure the success of programs in the passion of programs is not how many people they serve, but by how many people

get off of some of the entitlement programs. So that stand out to you or what does that actually mean to you? That's a longstanding um rhetorical point that a lot of a lot of anti spending Republicans have, basically that you can't measure the success of programs by the amount of money spent um. Now, there's usually a path for this, given for defense, because defense, as his budget

has been about doubled over the last seventeen years or so. Um. But now the other aspect of that is that he has a point in the sense that CBO does assume that if inflation is three percent, then for a program to do the same thing next year, is it needs at least a three percent increase. So in that sense there are sort of inflation expectations ratcheted into the CBO

nonpartisan baseline. You know, I thought that it was also uh, you know, I want to go back to the wall comments pick as people have said that there really hasn't been uh much money put aside to finance this program to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. People question, perhaps President Trump doesn't really mean a physical wall, but something that's a little bit more I'm a mix

between more surveillance and uh and some physical building. But but Mitmilviny said, we are dead serious about the border wall, and this is one of his top three priorities. What is that? What does that signifying? Where? Where? Where is the money going to come from? Well, in the in the budget, say they did one point six billion for for the wall, at least sort of start getting started.

I think the significance of that is that when when it comes time in September, everyone here on the Hill seems resigned to the idea already that we're looking at a continuing resolution come September to keep the government open. And so that will mean that again there will need

to be democratic support for doing so. And so that's where you set up this question whether we're going to have a shutdown showdown, whether Trump will follow through and what he said a couple weeks ago about you know, a good shutdown, things like that, UM, and so in that debate, should that happen in September as people seem to expect. Um this question of wall funding, which was sort of sort of worked through and sort of elited or sort of you know, kind of danced around in

flashed omnibus. UM. If that it truly is one of the top three priorities for the administration, then that could be a very big sticking point come September. That would be that races of flag there seems to me, Um, And just going back to what you were saying about the three growth rate, you're you flagged and rightly so that a lot of economist say it that is not probable.

In the New York term. You have people including Harvard professor Larry Summers, coming out and saying that just does not seem, uh in the cards, given the fact that you do have an aging population and just generally slower growth around the world. Do you expect there to be hearings where we have economists coming in and sort of throwing cold water on that three percent rate? Or is

this is this it? I mean it is this going to be basically, uh, you either have to accept it or you aren't even going to debate on the same on the same playing field. With respect to this budget, I assume it'll be a little bit more of a he said. She said, I mean, I think the Republicans controls, you know, the both chambers, so that they can they

can control what hearings are called. Um. I'm sure if Democrats control one of the chambers, they would love to have a hearing on what are realistic economic growth projections given the the aging and less productive workforce. Um. But that doesn't mean that the Democratic senators won't bring this up during the during the hearings tomorrow and the House Budget Committee, or the hearing tomorrow or the hearing Thursday

at the Center Budget Committee. UM. This is uh, this has been something that people have been sort of zeroing in on for a couple of days now in terms of in terms of possible bones of contention with this budget,

and it is such a such a uh. You know, there are some people the Committee for Responsive Subtle Budget by Person group the other week said they thought, you know, maybe you can get up to to two point one two point two if you did some reform, but it would be I think the phrase was quote pretty heroic to get to three from the current one point eight one point nine long term trend growth. Jonathan Nicholson, thank you so much for joining us and bringing down what

we've just listened to. Jonathan Nicholson, as a senior reporter at Bloomberg, we want to take a moment to let you know about something new from Bloomberg. Starting right now, you can use our io s app or our new Google Chrome extension to scan any news story on any website, instantly revealing relevant news and market data from Bloomberg and other sources related to the companies and people you're reading about.

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it out. Learn more at Blomberg dot com slash lens. Well, it is my honor to bring in Chris Hewlett, who is manager of US Drone Powered Solutions for Price Waterhouse Coopers, which is based in Washington, d C. Also a former Navy pilot for twenty one years, and he joins us now to talk about a very hot topic when it comes to all things delivery, which is drones and this

sort of dream that a lot of people have. One day we will look up in the skies and we will just see an army of drones dropping packages at our footsteps and delivering everything on demand. So Chris, thanks so much for joining us. I'd love to get your take first as we talk about this transition or adaptation of mail in a digital era, how much do drones really play into that at this point? Right? Thanks Lisa

for having me here today. And it's an interesting conversation because right now the drone addressable drone market, which we talked about a hundred and twenty seven billion dollars for drone applications, and what part of that is the delivery piece? And you take a look at last mile deliveries which a lot of people are doing experimentation with, and really it gets down to an addressable market. So before before you go on to UH drone application, could you give

us a sense of what that means? Okay, so drone application, UM, it's famously quoted. UM. There are companies out there that state that their package deliveries of them weigh less than five pounds, So less than five pounds is easily addressable with a drone UM. And then there's other companies that are large retail chains that UH speak about the statistics that of Americans alone live within five miles of a

large retail outlet. So now you're talking about an addressable market, right, So an application, so a five pound package being delivered from a large retail chain to a home within five aisles. That's an addressable market UM. But where those applications could be implemented. It really comes down to an implementation strategy, and I think what we have to do in this

country specifically is addressed three key issues. Uh. Safety. First, obviously there has to be going in and take people correct if if it's not a safe application, then obviously there's gonna be some federal issues with that and people will take social safety. The second thing has to be

consumer confidence, right because not not uncommon now. Think about the way things used to be back in the day when you could open up a catalog and you could order something that that risk was all on the can the delivery mechanism because it was all cash on delivery, right, So you order something out of a catalog on the phone and it showed up and you paid for it on the spot, and if you didn't have the cash

to pay for it, it was brought back home. That's not the case now, so all of the UM risk is on the consumer now to pay for something online and have it delivered to your house. So that has to be an addressable issue. Because if we can't give the consumer confidence that the package in question that costs fifty hundred dollars a thousand dollars is going to arrive without any kind of damage or on time. Well, but you know, I've got to be honest, I'm actually surprised

that we don't see any drones delivering anything. I mean, honestly, there's there. And not only do we not see any drones, but there has been such controversy over testing. There's you know, even having you know, potential test runs. So you know, how realistic is it that this will play any kind of meaningful part in the delivery of packages any time

in the near future. Sure. The great news is that there are federal agencies that are working on what's called the Unmanned Aerial System Transportation Management System u t M UH and that's going through testing phases right now. And the the idea behind u t M is to provide oversight from air traffic control perspective on where commercial applications are being utilized of drones. I think the fact the fastest way forward for delivery mechanisms is actually in a

rural area where it's less congested. Um. Ironically, this mirror is kind of what we're seeing on a global perspective from drone delivery mechanisms in third world countries which are finding the fastest proliferation of drone deliveries because of UM the need to get UM UH medicine, food, water, things to areas. So Tanzania UM it would be an example of utilization of drone strategies to get UM needed medicine to remote areas in a faster fashion. UH. And it's

because there's no federal restrictions. So who's running those operations? Well, those are all being done in partnership with various different governments and foreign entities that are working on drone UH implementation strategies. And you also talk about a hundred twenty seven billion dollars of business that could be involving drones in some level by and I have to wonder that

can't all be shipping us. What are sort of the majority of infrastructure monitoring so UM telecommunications and power distribution networks that need constant operations and maintenance have a heavy overhead with doing traditional rotor wing inspections UH. And there's a significant amount of danger associated with climbing up a

cell tower to do an inspection. UH. And if you think about the thousands of assets that exists within just one small entity of a country, all of them need to be inspected on a regular basis for UM vegetation, encroachment, UM birds, nesting. These are all things that cause your broadband to go down on your system that you know, yeah right, and so as a consumer, you want that to be taken care of. So the companies have to do operations and maintenance. UH gain a tremendous boost in

return on investment for using drone strategies. Chris, real quick. What companies stand up benefit the most as drones are adopted in a more accelerating manner. I think the power distribution oil and gas have the biggest benefit because you can use drones in a long haul environment where you're taking a look at distribution networks for areas like UH that have rolling blackouts that you could reduce blackouts. You're gonna get the biggest bank for the buck as far

as customer satisfaction at that point. Chris Hewlett, thank you so much for joining us here at the National Postal Forum in Maryland. Chris Hewlett as manager of US Drone Powered Solutions at Price Waterhouse Cooper's in Washington, d C. Also, he was at twenty one year veteran of the Navy, flying around getting a lot of experience, so this does not mystify him unlike some of the rest of us.

We are here in Baltimore at the National Postal Forum, which is a partner of the United States Postal Service, and we're talking about how to transform the concept of mail, physical, tangible on the ground mail in an era that's increasingly focused on your smartphone and on your tablet. And who better to do that for us to understand kind of

this connection and this evolution is Prita Mara. She's vice president of Mail Entry and Payment Technology at USPS and she joins us here now in Baltimore at the conference. Thank you so much for joining us, Pritha. So, what is sort of the forefront right now the way that the United States Postal Services trying to make it more sort of amenable to the digital era. Where are the frontiers if you will, Well, imagine if you could carry your collection box with you everywhere you go, your mailbox.

That's what we're doing. We're putting your mailbox into your phone, into your email, so that you can actually sign up. For those that haven't, I'm going to encourage you to sign up to our informed delivery platform. It's fantastic. So you see picture images of every mail piece that's coming to your mailbox. Boy, are we bringing that mail piece alive? Okay, hold on one second. So this means that you can see the actual uh items of mail that would be

in your mailbox. Can you digitally open them? I mean, is it something where you basically are getting all of your mail digitally or you just can sort of take inventory of what you have and take stock and well, there's a lot going on with that. So you can see the picture of the of the mail piece, and then advertisers can and can attach a ride along coupon or an image they can attach U r L so that you know, when you see this image, you can click through and you could go into an entire entirely

new experience. So it's essentially bringing mail alive. It's got a huge personality with every mail piece. You can click and you can be rendered into a whole new experience.

So I'm trying to think because Paul Sweeney of Bloomberg Intelligence was on earlier and he was talking about how an increasing number of direct mailers are trying to use online information to then better target people with physical pieces of mail, and yet this seems to be a way that people could potentially bypass the physical sort of direct

mailings and sort of attached coupons and other things. I'm just confused sort of how how to be the most effective for this absolutely not so, yeah, you got it all wrong. So let me tell you know what it is. This is what we're doing is we're creating multiple of impressions. So think about it. We've got a pretty we've got a boatload of social media clutter today, right, and so mail stands out. So what this does is you get this mail piece, you keep them, You keep the mail

piece with you. You you then perhaps you've got an augmented reality going on on that mail piece. You can then, you know, shine your phone on it and you can be rendered another experience with informed delivery. You're getting an image of your mail piece, so you know, hey, there's

something really important in my mailbox. I gotta go get it. Um. You can also then click into that image and think about the world of advertisers, and they can link that physical catalog with multiple experiences, So you're going to have multiple expressions, impressions, expressions, and multiple experiences. So how how soon is this being rolled out or is it already happening? Oh, it's it's all rolled out. And if you haven't signed up, you're missing the boat there. So I'm gonna tell you

you are you're you're alright. You can sign up now. Advertisers can start using it, and we've got some huge success stories. Let me tell you about some open rates. Okay, email open rates are over seventy We're getting response rates in the high seven eight nine percent. Where's the biggest

the adoption right now? It's retailers, It's it's it's no I mean like locations in the US, I mean, is it very specific geographically where people are sort of well when when we rolled it out, we started in the top metro area, so that of course, and so you know, and we are getting consumers of signing up at an alarming rate. We have over two million registered subscribers, so

those eyeballs are increasing every day. You know, we talk a lot about how in the Amazon era, people are shipping a lot more, uh, in order just to sort of order things online. Bring it to their doorstep. But what about personal letters? Because I feel like emails kind of have overwhelmed that. Have you found that there is something specially you're saying that there is something different or

you know, distinctive about getting a physical piece of mail. Uh, you know, have you seen sort of the drop in personal letters kind of stabilized and people going back to that at all? Or I think we are seeing that millennials believe it or not a loving mail, So people are going back because they really lies the power of that that mail piece. Because now that you've got all this different communications, mail is just a different experience. You

go home, you access it when you want it. You're not reading it amongst seventy other emails or Facebook or this or that that you have to go through. You're actually interacting with it at your own pace. So you have a different relationship. You have a karma relationship. You have a more sustaining relationship with that mail piece than you do with all the social media. And I think people are realizing the power of that that relationship. Thank you so much for joining us. Sounds like an exciting

time and for being here in Baltimore. Pretamera. She is the vice president of mail entry and payment technology for the United States Postal Service, talking about different payment systems that what she didn't get quite into that, but she was talking about the digitization of what your mailbox looks like and how you can check what's there, and the possible opportunity is for markets as well. Thank you so much for joining us, Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg

P and L podcast. You can subscribe and listen to interviews at Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, or whatever podcast platform you prefer. I'm pim Fox. I'm on Twitter at pim Fox. I'm on Twitter at Lisa abramoits one before the podcast. You can always catch us worldwide on Bloomberg Radio