A banking client needed to reduce expenses. They asked CMS to review their mailing practices to determine if they could save any more money on postage.
Project. A national bank routinely mails large volumes of statements and reports throughout the US. They discussed their mailing practices with CMS to determine if they could reduce postage costs without sacrificing mailing service levels or transit times.
Problem. Routinely, when considering expense reductions, postage savings was usually not top of mind. In this case, it had been a while since the bank had any independent assessment of their mailing practices. They had made the assumption that there would be little opportunity for savings – although they really did not know if that were true.
Solution. Our CMS mail experts spoke with a number of the operations employees at the bank and reviewed their mail practices in detail. CMS quickly realized something critical.
Per SEC guidelines, financial institutions are not allowed to alter or correct their electronic mail files unless an update is requested by the end customer. Because of this guideline, some of the bank’s mail had outdated addresses. The post office must correct addresses on first class mail, so the bank was sending its mail through the USPS at full first-class rates.
CMS was able to help because we are licensed by the USPS, and directly connected to, their NCOA (National Change of Address) database. As a result, we are able to make the address changes on behalf of the post office. For each mailing, we update the address on the physical mail piece without altering our client’s electronic mail file. In fact, as part of this process, we don’t even have access to their electronic mail file.
This service is called Move Update. By implementing this service, we can consolidate and presort the bank’s mail prior to delivering it to the post office – providing our clients with postage discounts.
Result. CMS now picks up the bank’s mail every day and processes the outdated addresses through our Move Update service. We then consolidate it with our other clients’ mail before presorting it and submitting it to the USPS. Through this process, we are able to save our client up to 15%.
