Understanding Postal: USPS Transitions to Digital Agency in Hopes to Survive

Two areas the USPS plans to initially focus its efforts on are its role as a trusted platform that can connect authenticated users to businesses and agencies for "personal business" transactions through secure messaging, as well as building a consumer platform.

The USPS is assessing a platform for secure messaging of purely digital communications that are confidential, transmitted between authenticated senders and receivers, and as a result are trusted. Vogel said this type of expansion into digital services would represent a virtualization of the USPS' core principles — trust, security, connectivity and identity. He noted the federal government has been discussing such communications and has invited the USPS to take part in the discussions to see if it could be one of the operators of the system.