Unlock millions: Why your mailroom is a hidden financial asset

The foundational mindset shift: Mail is a corporate asset

Corporate mail is a valuable and sensitive asset that requires robust security and governance, not just sorting.

Question

What does the journey of a piece of incoming mail look like inside a typical mailroom today?

Answer

What happens to incoming corporate mail varies widely depending on size, industry, and an organization’s digital maturity. Traditionally, large organizations maintain extensive physical mailrooms where employees manually sort mail by floor, department, or recipient. This process has become more challenging as hybrid work models and distributed global offices become more common. Many employees work remotely or without assigned desks, making physical mail delivery less straightforward. Even when a document does get handed over or scanned and actioned, the physical piece of mail sits around or is shredded without careful consideration of its retention requirement, risk, or value.

Question

What are the most common or invisible delays, risks, or points of failure in this traditional mail process?

Answer

The biggest risk in how organizations handle their mail today is the break in the chain of custody. Let’s see how this might happen. A critical document—like a W-2, legal notice, or check—is first physically handed to an employee. They might view or scan it according to their assigned workflow but then leave it on their desk, forget about it, or even worse, take it home. The company’s responsibility for that asset doesn’t end when it gets into an employee’s hands.

Corporate responsibility continues until that sensitive data, official record, or valuable information has been extracted, securely stored, or dispositioned according to compliance policy. The exposure or risk to a company doesn’t only happen with a digital cyberattack. It can happen just as easily through the mishandling of physical mail.

Beyond digitization: Reimagining mail as an accelerated and integrated workflow

Beyond simple scanning, integrating your mail processes into larger, automated workflows can turn a physical trigger into a powerful driver for growth.

Question

Why should organizations seek a unified, digital-forward solution instead of a basic scanning vendor?

Answer

While many traditional mail centers and processing providers can scan mail and email you the images, employees still have to download those files, sort them, and route them to the right person for action and data extraction. The old way of doing things requires a human in the loop, and significant efficiency is lost. Information from your physical mail can then sit dormant, or worse, pose a security risk.

Corporate mail can be more than a nuisance, risk, or cost of doing business. Like much of the information you handle daily, your mail is a valuable asset for your organization. Having a single, trusted partner to manage the journey of your mail from the physical to the digital and through to the business outcome makes all the difference in getting the most value possible from your mail.

Question

How does Iron Mountain Digital Mail help bring together physical and digital worlds?

Answer

We are seeing many organizations evolve their mail process with Iron Mountain Digital Mail, and it’s very exciting. Operations leaders are thrilled that their physical mail is delivered digitally and faster. But the question that follows this excitement is almost always, “How can I leverage more from my mail and fit this process more easily into my digital goals?” This is where we connect the physical aspect of mail processing to a digital workflow.

In an end-to-end journey, we don’t just scan and hand over the documents. Unlike other solutions that stop there, our approach is truly comprehensive, spanning from physical receipt to disposition and integration into your business outcomes. We provide tailored solutions that trigger entire business workflows. For example:

• In Accounts Payable (AP), we can process invoices by extracting the right information, providing line-level coding, and automatically routing them through the approval process within the existing ERP system.
• At an insurance company, we can take a physical customer claim form with several attachments and manage the entire intake and process workflow digitally.

Triggering and connecting these various workflows previously took several days. The move toward a digital and automated framework frees up your teams to do more valuable work, like analyzing vendor spend to renegotiate contracts.

End-to-end digital and physical governance: Gaining security, efficiency, and value

A single partner can securely manage the entire lifecycle of information, from physical receipt to disposition, delivering tangible business outcomes.

Question

How does Iron Mountain’s reputation for security and compliance directly benefit our Digital Mail customers?

Answer

Our reputation for security is a byproduct of something deeper: more than seven decades of expertise in full lifecycle information management. This includes our rigorous vetting and training processes for all employees who handle sensitive documents, which upholds data privacy and maintains a secure chain of custody. We use what we’ve learned from partnering with more than 240,000 global customers to help you design a compliant, best-practice workflow. The real benefit of partnership is gaining access to a deep well of information lifecycle knowledge to fortify your end-to-end mail processing.

Built on Iron Mountain InSight^® Digital Experience Platform (DXP), Digital Mail uses AI-powered automation to identify and classify your documents containing sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) to meet strict regional or industry-specific privacy requirements, allowing only authorized individuals to access your data. Digital Mail can also apply specific, granular governance policies when integrated with Iron Mountain Policy Center. 

And when retention has been met and the information’s lifecycle ends, we provide you with a shredding certification as a defensible, auditable record for regulators and other auditing purposes.

Question

How can operational leaders save time and money with Digital Mail?

Answer

Physical mailrooms are managed by a large number of employees and take up a huge real estate footprint. With Digital Mail, you can lift and shift that cost and resource drag to us. With more than 140 scanning centers processing more than 2 billion documents a year, we’re ready when and where you are. Our subject matter expertise in managing various industry-specific customers brings immense efficiency to your mail operations right from the beginning.

The most significant impact is often on speed. Where previously you had a piece of mail sit on your desk for three, four, or five days awaiting action from hybrid or remote workers, that’s not happening with a digital, automated workflow. Actioning mail (and the data locked within) is happening every day.

Imagine a check that used to sit on a desk for days before being deposited. Now, it gets into our system, is digitized, and can be processed within 24 hours. That's money in the bank. Accelerating that process could potentially save customers millions of dollars in working capital.

The power of the platform: Driving digital transformation

The technology behind Digital Mail—Iron Mountain InSight DXP—enables flexibility, customization, and future innovation.

Question

For organizations that recognize the need for a more value-driven mail solution, what does the implementation journey look like with Digital Mail?

Answer

We partner with the company to understand their specific needs. What is the mix of mail they get? Are they invoices, insurance claims, or legal notices? The process is nuanced based on the company and its industry. Luckily, with our vast customer base, we have seen it all and have developed both standard and specialized mailroom offerings.

We can provide a standard mailroom for general corporate mail, or a specialized one, like a mortgage post-close mailroom, a bank lockbox, or a retail company's rebate processing mailroom. We can add a bolt-on workflow based on the customer’s needs to create a tailored solution.

Question

How do you envision Digital Mail evolving? What customer needs are getting the team excited about what’s next?

Answer

We’re excited because this journey is moving from digitizing mail to automating the entire workflow that is triggered by it. We are developing more templated solutions for specific verticals like legal, healthcare, and finance, which address rigorous business outcomes and strict service-level agreements.

What truly excites us is using InSight DXP to unleash new possibilities. The platform’s power enables us to move beyond standard solutions, tailoring them to each customer’s unique processes and business objectives. We’re helping our customers view mail not as a final destination but as the beginning of a digital journey that builds efficiency and improves margins.

Many thanks to Pinku for sharing her perspective. See how Iron Mountain Digital Mail works and why it’s quickly becoming a smart choice for modern organizations.

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