Vpostcode is a national postal address coding platform, developed by the Vietnam Post. It provides information about address codes and the locations and coordinates of more than 23 million addresses.
Vpostcode is a tool to assign digital addresses to households. The code has two parts, with 1 of 5 characters of the national postal code and 2 of 7 characters of an open location code, which assigns address codes and positioning on the digital map platform.
Launched in May, the platform is used to generate postal address codes to authenticate a citizen. It can provide a solution to the problems of finding medical addresses, fire prevention, and service addresses on the digital map. The digitisation of addresses will pave the way for e-government and administrative procedure reform, a press release has claimed.
Vpostcode aims to combine the national postal address coding platform with online public service portals to improve services to citizens. With Vpostcode, people will only need to declare their addresses once on Vietnam Post’s PostID (electronic authentication system) to use personal codes with their addresses for several different public services.
Users can type their postal address codes in the online public service portal and will receive authentication. They do not need to go through declaration procedures with complicated figures and data, the release explained. Once the online public service portals are connected with Vpostcode and PostID, the address codes will be sent to the Vietnam Post, and a delivery person will go to the registered addresses to receive or give documents.
Currently, Vpostcode has more than 23 million addresses. However, according to the Deputy General Director of the Vietnam Post, the data is collected by the organisation, so it needs to be checked, which can only be done with the cooperation of local authorities.
A representative from the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) emphasised the important role of local information and communication departments in verifying addresses and then making them available to administrative public service applications. An Giang, Hanoi, and Da Nang plan to apply Vpostcode on a trial basis.
Vietnam Post has also proposed turning postal address codes into standard data to connect systems, encouraging public service procedures to have standards and guiding businesses and people on how to use postal address codes for services.
A representative of the Tay Ninh Information and Communication Department proposed taking another step forward by connecting Vpostcode with Post ID to link electronic systems. With the aim of developing a digital map, postal address code, and postal address databases into a common platform, Vpostcode is built in a way to create ecosystem connections. If a user wants to open a bank account online, they can log in with their identification codes and get PostID authentication at the national public service portal. Banks would grant accounts immediately after authentication and verification, the release noted.
Address databases play an important role in the digital economy. In e-commerce, some websites have implemented customer address authentication services to avoid fake addresses, which make it difficult to deliver items to owners, affecting postal delivery performance. Other business fields, including electricity, water, gas, telecommunication, and security services, also need exact address information to increase customer satisfaction.
