The focus at IFO Fusion, held this year at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, is still clearly on the world of accounts payable automation; but the audience at this year’s well-attended event also had interest in a number of other areas, including cloud-based solutions, outsourcing, and learning more about topics like medical banking and digital mail.
I presented to a good-sized audience on the topic of healthcare payments automation and reconciliation. The audience included representatives of a number of banks that are exploring adding this type of service to their existing lockbox offerings for their healthcare-provider customers.
There was a good exchange of ideas about the challenges of both constructing postable EDI 835 files as well as the need to focus on the reconciliation, through a single source, of both the paper EOB and EDI streams of remittances. The Department of Health and Human Services interim final rule related to the use of NACHA ACH transactions sets for integration of the payment data with the EDI remittance stream and the looming January 2014 deadline for compliance was also a heavily discussed item. [Read more…]
Digital mail is coming, and mailers know it. At Payments 2012 in Baltimore and CS Week in Grapevine, Texas, there was plenty of interest in the technology and plenty of questions, which I answered alongside our partners from industry leader Zumbox. Let’s take a quick look at three questions about digital mail that seemed to come up again and again.
1. How does digital mail work, and how is it different from email?
Digital mail is electronic home delivery. It places a user’s bills, statements, notices and other customer correspondence in an online mailbox. There they can be viewed, the bills paid and the letters, statements, bills, etc. stored without the user having to go to the website of each bank, utility and insurer with whom they deal. It’s different from email in that it’s a secure system that links known senders with known recipients. And while email tells you your statement is ready for viewing on a company website, digital mail delivers that statement. [Read more…]
Last week I had the opportunity to take part in a webinar on digital mail and Systemware’s Digital Mail Gateway, our new solution that transforms customer communications and delivers them to digital mail providers.
Statements, bills, invoices, policy information, rewards program updates, declarations pages, proxy statements and annual reports are just some of the communications that can be effectively delivered digitally at a much lower cost than paper.
Information is fed into the Digital Mail Gateway in its existing form. There it’s segmented and packaged for delivery to the digital mail providers. It’s one solution, one point of integration, delivered to all the different channels. [Read more…]
Several upcoming events will give us an opportunity to talk about medical banking and Digital Mail Gateway, our new solution that enables corporations and print and mail providers to transform, package and deliver customer communications to consumers through digital mail providers.
Alan Beaney and I will be in Baltimore for Payments 2012, which runs from April 29 to May 2. More than 2,500 people are expected at Payments, where we’ll talk about digital mail alongside our partner Zumbox. Among the industry’s leading providers, Zumbox has created a digital mailbox for every street address in the country where an exact electronic copy of a paper item is delivered in a secure, central, online environment. [Read more…]
The National Postal Forum held last week in Orlando, Fla., served as a reminder that while the future of mail maybe digital, its present is firmly in print.
In outlining the United States Postal Service’s Plan to Profitability, its five-year business plan, the agency’s chief financial officer listed among its challenges what the Postal Service calls the “electronic diversion” of first-class mail. Its volume of first-class mail has declined 25 percent in just the last five years, and now is just 5 percent of total mail volume. Bills, invoices, financial statements and legal notices make up another 20 percent, and the remaining 75 percent is direct mail in one form or another. [Read more…]
Some businesses are drowning in data, and it’s not just the sheer volume that’s a concern. When different business units have different and incompatible enterprise content management systems, information isn’t as easily shared. Mergers and acquisitions bring their own integration headaches, as do redundant systems, multiple vendors, and shifts from mainframes to distributed operating systems. More than ever, companies are looking for effective content conversion solutions that will help them migrate, store, manage and access large stores of information.
In exploring data conversion, managers tend to focus on five objectives. They want seamless migration. They want it to be fast. They want scalability. They want to improve customer service. And they want to lower their cost of ownership. Some ECM providers like to talk about cheaper, faster and better, but few can deliver all three in the same solution. To be truly effective, a conversion strategy must identify the most efficient ways to migrate documents to formats such as PDF or XML; and when required convert to the new platform quickly and seamlessly without downtime or disruption. [Read more…]
The focus at IFO Fusion, held this year at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, is still clearly on the world of accounts payable automation; but the audience at this year’s well-attended event also had interest in a number of other areas, including cloud-based solutions, outsourcing, and learning more about topics like medical banking and digital mail.
