Fulmine Group, the QES between recipient and sender

Success stories told by our customers

In the mailbox, on the car windscreen, inside delivery bags, or on the pharmacy counter. So many sheets of paper often end up forgotten in some drawer, if not in the bin (the recycling bin, hopefully).
How much of this material is actually necessary? And how much of it could, in fact, be dematerialised, gaining numerous benefits in the process?
Some of these “pieces of paper”, however, are more important than others, and it’s essential to keep them and be able to find them when needed: in this case, digitisation can be a great help, but at the same time it calls for extra care.
Fulmine Group was founded in Palermo in 2007 and is today one of the leading postal operators in Italy, with 400 agencies and 10 hubs. It stands out for its efficient IT infrastructure and for a vision built on technological innovation, with particular attention to the customer experience. In summer 2020, they approached Intesa (IBM Group) looking for a solution that would eliminate return receipts for registered mail with acknowledgement of receipt (AR).

«We were looking for a solution to offer our customers that would be innovative and digital compared to delivering registered mail with a return receipt. We wanted to eliminate the paper receipt while at the same time giving the customer an alternative that could certify, with the same level of security, that the registered item had been delivered» explains Roberto Tinervia, ICT Manager at Fulmine Group.

The return receipt, however, remains an important document, since it constitutes an act issued by a person in charge of a public service, which cannot be challenged except through a specific legal procedure known as “querela di falso” (a claim of forgery).* How, then, to go about digitising this document while still preserving its legal security?

«The complexity, and also the biggest challenge of the project, was finding a solution that, from a legal standpoint, would allow us to remove the paper receipt, while still guaranteeing its validity for the customer. Intesa supported us both from a technological point of view and with legal consultancy, helping us bring the project to completion» Tinervia continues.

This gave rise to a solution involving the recipient’s signature being applied via a digital device and, once the receipt document has been completed with the delivery details, the application on the same document of a qualified electronic signature (QES) held by the postal worker, using certificates issued by Intesa’s CA.
Intesa also supported Fulmine Group in the professional training of postal workers on the qualified electronic signature issued in their name.

The solution was released in January 2021, only a few months after the start of the project. This speed of implementation quickly translated into benefits, both in internal processes and for the customer (from Fulmine Group’s point of view, as the sender of the registered mail): «In terms of costs, we can already benefit from a saving of resources. Our service used to involve, even in the case of paper registered mail, scanning all the return receipts ourselves and then uploading them to the web portal, so that the customer could retrieve them in digital format whenever needed. We have now eliminated this manual operation, and receipts are uploaded to the web portal automatically, within just a few hours. Furthermore, it’s no longer necessary to transport the receipts from our branches to our hubs and then back again to the sender».

Tangible advantages just a few months after the solution’s release, so much so that Fulmine Group is already thinking about the next step, considering the digitisation of delivery notice slips with proof of reading via digital identity. But that’s another Success Story.

* Source: leggepertutti.it, “La raccomandata non fa prova senza l’avviso di ricevimento” (Registered mail is not proof without an acknowledgement of receipt)