I’m in Australia. It is the same here. Everything is digital. I only really check my mailbox maybe once or maybe twice a week, if that, because i so rarely get mail anymore. Everything comes digitally. my welfare stuff, utilities, bills etc.

Excuse me, I am currently in Germany.
So could you please resend your post to me via Telefax?

Boy do I have bad news for you. 🤣

Okay time to vote CDU for the first time in my life, can’t have Germany’s government step on its legacy like that.

/s

But e.g. was still the main means of communication between my doctor’s office and the physio therapists I had to go to a few months back… But you are right, it’s use is finally diminishing!

What happens if your bank is hacked and it says that you have $1 instead of 10k in the bank? Do you have a paper backup at all? How about your mortgage or car loan?

What if it is robbed and the paper is taken? Do they have a digital backup at all?

A bank should spend the same amount of money on digital security than physical security. I mean, security is the whole point banks exist in the first place and why people trust them.

There are way more people who can attempt a hack than can attempt to break in.

That’s why you have both, having backups is part of being secure.

I am in Poland. We have digital ID and drivers licences that are on par with plastic ones, digital patients portal where we get our prescriptions with QR code, we register and make changes to our business online etc. I never got mail from the bank but from time to time I get paper mail from various institutions - extreamly stupid situation last week - I wrote to the ministry online, via government portal and got answer via traditional mail 🤦‍♂️

While I fully agree thing should be digital (mail or fax are you kidding me?), very few business have secure email set up, especially for PII and health data. And even if they did, most consumers don’t want to deal with setting up encrypted email/PGP keys or anything like that.
Of course this could be solved with online portals to submit PDFs and things.

It is often simply a legal thing. In many countries, laws have clauses for the legality of written notification, but no amendments or specification about how this works for a digital notification.

A non-cynical answer would be that for important financial or legal transactions, companies consider mail to be the most certain and binding, and the higher standard of evidence.

A cynical answer would be that mail-only processes exist to dissuade you from using them.

You’ll often find that accounts and services can be opened digitally but to close them you need to mail or phone. This is to make the company more money.

In cases where an organisation has to provide you information legally and can’t charge you for it, that might also be done by mail to encourage you to not bother.

For things like digital person-to-person money transfers, Europe solved that long ago by making bank transfers free and easy. In the US bank transfers are often a paid service, which is why people are still sending cheques to each other, and why the US has such a plethora of money-sending apps and companies all after a slice of the pie.

TL;DR - Money

To an extent, institutional inertia. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Adopting new systems brings in a layer of uncertainty, sure maybe there is some upside to the new system, but does it outweigh the risk and cost of overhauling all the dependencies of the old system? Can you be sure that all the relevant stakeholders and partners will be onboard with the new system, or will some reject it and insist on the old system, thus requiring everyone to maintain two standards.

It’s much easier to adopt a new system when the old system is clearly non-functional and untrustworthy, or when there just wasn’t an earlier system that did that function in a given economic environment. The more important the institution, the more issue it causes if it fails, the more this applies.

Building a secure, reliable, accessible and privacy respecting identity management infrastructure would be a monumental task, even if only good-faith actors were involved. Unfortunately, good-faith actors are in very short supply these days. In places like China or Singapore, people have no expectation of privacy to begin with, so it’s easier to build digital services there.

You have a shitty bank 🤷‍♂️ I haven’t mailed docs ever in my adult life.

It depends on the bank. All my banks want everything to be digital and pushes everything to be handled online. This includes signing.

I’d question what bank you have.

A few answers:

Sounds like you have a shitty bank.

Traditional mail is important in the US because not everyone has access to the technology you speak of. Keep in mind, the USA is 50 countries in a trenchcoat and many areas / states are 3rd world.

Institutions like to use the previous point to justify not updating systems or keeping systems intentionally frustrating in the hopes people will not bother them.