Digital Postal Service 'SmartPOST' Conducts Pilot Project with Leading Municipalities Using Public Service Mesh

xID Corporation, a GovTech startup supporting local governments through the use of My Number cards and digital IDs (HQ: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Hikaru Kusaka), announced that its digital postal service 'SmartPOST' has conducted a pilot project in collaboration with municipalities leading the adoption of the 'Public Service Mesh' promoted by the Digital Agency. This pilot aims to advance the digitization of administrative notices while reducing the workload of municipal staff and improving operational efficiency.

■ Background
Administrative notices sent from municipalities to residents are still primarily paper-based in many jurisdictions. This creates a significant workload for municipal staff, including printing, inserting, mailing, as well as confirming and correcting recipient information. Since administrative notices must reach every resident reliably, high accuracy is required in their operation.

While the digitization of administrative notices has progressed in recent years, local government core systems require high levels of security, imposing restrictions on external connections. This has necessitated bespoke, case-by-case data integration with private services, posing a challenge for deployment and operation. As a result, it has been difficult to fully leverage the flexibility and convenience of private services in the administrative sector.

Against this backdrop, the Digital Agency has been leading the development of the 'Public Service Mesh (Information Utilization Service within Local Governments)' to serve as a platform for safely and smoothly integrating and utilizing data held by the government. In fiscal 2025, the Public Service Mesh is being tested for integration with private services through digital authentication apps, and it is expected to serve as a platform for enhancing administrative services while reducing the burden on local governments.

■ Overview of the Pilot
In this pilot, we verified a mechanism to safely connect municipal core systems with private services for residents by integrating the digital postal service 'SmartPOST' with the Public Service Mesh, thereby facilitating the smooth digitization of administrative notices.

In the participating municipalities, we confirmed that data from core systems built on the Government Cloud, a common cloud infrastructure for administration, can be integrated with SmartPOST, a private SaaS, safely and smoothly via the Public Service Mesh.

This aims to reduce the burden of tasks that previously required individual handling between private services and core systems, thereby streamlining operations for municipal staff and realizing a service that delivers administrative notices to residents accurately and reliably.

■ Future Outlook
Through this pilot, we will consider new operational methods for administrative notices sent from municipalities to residents using the Public Service Mesh to reduce the workload of municipal staff and improve operational efficiency.

Moving forward, looking ahead to the start of full-scale operation in fiscal 2026, we will proceed with building an environment that can reliably deliver administrative notices to residents via 'SmartPOST' using data integrated through the Public Service Mesh.