Following the implementation of the new EU ICS2 system on March 15, under which all goods imported into the European Union customs area, including through postal networks, will have to be pre-registered, the International Post Corporation (IPC) has been certified as the official sender of the data on behalf of 26 posts participating in its Centralised Operational Message Exchange and Translation System (COMETS).
The EU ICS2 system represents an operational challenge for posts and IPC worked with its member posts to develop a solution to address this. COMETS enables postal data to be transmitted to the EU system in a centralized manner, reducing the burden and the costs for posts.
Holger Winklbauer, CEO, IPC, said, “The entry into force of the new ICS2 obligation represents a major challenge for EU posts importing goods into the EU. The launch of IPC COMETS is the result of a successful cooperation with our members. It shows how IPC can support its members to deal with these kinds of requests in a streamlined and cost-effective way. In addition, COMETS has the potential to be used to assist posts with similar international pre-registration obligations in the field of customs or security.”
IPC COMETS is designed to map electronic data messages from the postal EDI format to the EU’s Entry Summary Declarations (ENS) format. Since the required data is already available in the IPC Data Hub and is already transported over IPC’s Message Exchange Platform, extending these systems to provide a centralized solution enables the posts to comply with the new obligations in a streamlined way and at a lower cost.
