CREDIT: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun Roger Couldrey is president and chief executive officer of Canada Post’s highly successful epost electronic mail delivery service, now serving nearly 300,000 Canadians.

Nearly 300,000 Canadians signed up for Canada Post’s electronic postal payment service in the first three months of this year, epost president and CEO Roger Couldrey says.

He credits surging interest to epost’s emergence as the dominant player since it acquired webdox, its primary competitor, last year.

And he’s hoping interest will snowball this summer as the last of the major financial institutions integrate their online banking systems with epost and word spreads that the number of companies using the service for billing has reached critical mass.

So far the free service is used by about two million of Canada‘s 11 million Internet banking households.

Research suggests it takes at least five electronic bills to interest individuals in subscribing to a service that allows them to receive and pay bills from any location where they have online access.

Epost has signed up more than 100 companies, many of them major names, and Couldrey says that translates into seven to 10 pieces of mail that the average consumer can receive electronically each month.

In addition to the big banks, B.C. mailers using epost include Canadian Tire, Chevron, Citifinancial, City of Burnaby, City of Richmond, City of Nanaimo, Future Shop, HBC, Home Hardware, Rogers, Telus, Terasen Gas, The Brick, United Furniture Warehouse, Visions Electronics and Zellers. BC Hydro and the City of Vancouver are coming soon.

The advantage for billers is that they save money, paying about 40 cents apiece for an electronic bill versus 70 cents to $2 for snail mail, depending on what’s counted in the cost, Couldrey said in an interview in Vancouver.

Apart from saving on stamps, convenience is the primary advantage for consumers. They can pay bills when they want and from where they want, a significant advantage for snowbirds and summer vacationers.

Many of epost’s two million subscribers also access epost through their bank’s website, allowing them to centralize their financial management. Now the two major payroll companies, Ceridian and ADP, are getting involved, allowing for electronic delivery of pay stubs.

Intuit has also signed up, allowing users of Quicken and QuickTax to synchronize data and pre-populate their online tax returns, reducing the likelihood of input errors.

“It is all coming together,” Couldrey said. “It has been a slow birth but our volumes have been going up 10 per cent per month since the integration of webdox and epost.”

Visit www.epost.ca for more information.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005