Poste Italiane's pivot from postal service to platform powerhouse

Thank you, Julie.

We try to give to Italians services that they need for their everyday needs. We do parcel services, and then we do financial services, and we do some utility services such as SIM cards, fixed line and now energy products.

The reinvention was trying to bring a company into the trends of the future, which was very clear in 2017 when I took the helm of the company. It was already a very strong company really entrenched in the country with a lot of physical offices in 13,000 locations all around Italy. And then we basically decided that there was a transformation, a digital transformation taking place, which we wanted to position the company to support because we are so present in everyday Italian's life that if we are digital, it means that our clients are digital and they become more productive and more modern. In transforming such a large company like Poste, 140,000 people, very physical, you need a big injection of technology know-how, and in this respect, Accenture was instrumental in helping us having the best advice and making it very fast and very effective.

The world in the next 20 years is going somewhere and your role as the CEO of the company is to position the company to benefit and to be aligned with those trends taking place. And it was clearly the digitalization of payments. You know, when I came in 2017, only 30% of payments in Italy were electronic, 70% was with cash, with paper money. The second trend was clearly in 2017 already emerging strong is e-commerce, and that's another bet that we put on the table. And the third one was clearly the general digitalization of services. So payment slips going digital, digital IDs for public services.

There are in Italy 800 players in the space. And so it's not a market with no players, quite the opposite. We built a risk management platform, we built a CRM system, a billing system, all from scratch with the digital tools of today. And we were extremely helpful in building a product that was of the best user experience possible for our clients, and this is a client that buys it online, or more frequently a client that buys it in the office and came out with a very successful product. We are going to be 1 million clients by the end of the year. We are the third operator in-country in three years from scratch. We have a 60% ratio of new clients. More importantly, we have more than 50% success rate in turning quotes into contracts.