At the recent Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Melbourne, Australia Post Managing Director and Group CEO, Ahmed Fahour, revealed that his company is exploring using a blockchain to store identities for personal services. Citing that Australia Post already handles 90 percent of all Australian passports, he stated that identity services was one of the largest opportunities in e-commerce for the company. "The future is going to be a digital identity, so that when you say who you are, I can tell who you are. […] A lot of people are thinking about blockchain from a financial services point of view but the reality is it has much wider applications."
– Ahmed Fahour, Australia Post Managing Director & CEO
Australia Post is a government business enterprise, with 4,417 Post Offices, including 2,560 in rural and remote areas, delivering more than 60 million items every week.
While the Commonwealth Government of Australia is its sole shareholder, the Post is self funded, receiving no taxpayer funding, and has paid more than AUD$2.5 billion in dividends to the Australian government over the past ten years.
In addition to traditional postal services, Australia Post offers a broad range of financial products on behalf of businesses and government, collectively referred to as Agency Services , which includes bill payment, banking, money transfer and identity services.
“As Australia’s oldest, continually operating organisation, Australia Post is a national icon that has been providing a core essential service for over 200 years. However, Australia Post is entering difficult times.[…] The forecast is that things are likely to get worse before they get better.”
– McKell Institute
The decline in traditional postal revenue is by no means confined to Australia. The U.S. Postal Service reported full year revenue of US$68.9 billion for 2015, but a net loss of US$5.06 billion.In the 2014 financial year, Australia […]
