ISO and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) have agreed to increase their cooperation in the development of international standards for postal services. ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden and UPU Director General Edouard Dayan signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Bern, Switzerland, on 30 January 2008 to formalize the partnership.
ISO and UPU already have a long-standing collaboration. The UPU has liaison status with five of ISO's technical committees developing standards with relevance to postal delivery, including paper and board, packaging, information processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), radio frequency identification (RFID), bar coding and country codes.
Alan Bryden commented: “The globalization and liberalization of trade, supported by global supply chains and the development of the Internet, result in a mutation of postal services worldwide. International standards are key to ensure effective inter-operability, processing and distribution of data, objects and services.
"The MoU between UPU and ISO, a follow-up to the recent UPU Strategy Conference in Dubai, will ensure that postal services increasingly benefit from globally relevant standards, making the best use of the specific expertise available in UPU and the multi-sector, multistakeholder platform of ISO.
"Consistency and synergy on standards for quality, security and environmental management, as well as for information technologies, RFID and conformity assessment, will be closely monitored and promoted through the implementation of the MoU, which constitutes another positive illustration of the collaboration between the UN network and the ISO system.”
For the UPU, Edouard Dayan pointed out, "The UPU manages a three-dimensional network: physical, electronic and financial. We have already developed many standards for the processing of physical mail. We now need to focus on standards for electronic and financial services. The cooperation agreement with the ISO is intended to do just that."
As postal operators diversify their activities, incorporate e-commerce into their parcel and logistics services and develop their financial services, they need to operate in a standardized environment. As a standards organization itself, the UPU has already developed nearly 100 technical standards for the postal sector. The agreement with ISO will enable the UPU to better position itself on the world stage and help it to prepare and better disseminate postal standards, particularly for financial and electronic services, that are recognized internationally, not only by postal experts but also by standards experts in other sectors of activity.
Following the MoU, the two organizations are to set up a contact committee of six officials responsible for implementing the provisions of the agreement.
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