Mr. Chair and members of Parliament, thank you for meeting with us in Lévis.
Canada Post is currently a major service provider for Desjardins, since we mail about 108 million letters a year. In general, the letters are mailed by our network of caisses or by the Desjardins card service, which represents the vast majority of clients with the exchange of cards, whether they are bank cards, Visa cards, or another type of card.
Desjardins Group has exactly eight distribution centres in Canada. Each distribution centre manages a high volume of letters, documents or packages. Recently, we expanded out west by acquiring State Farm.
Desjardins has started a major project to digitize all its documents. In the past two years, our shipments have decreased by 5%. We have a number of major global digitization projects. In the next five to ten years, most documents will be completely digital. We estimate that, within at least five years, the decrease will result in 30% fewer Desjardins shipments. The number of documents shipped by Canada Post, our main service provider, will decrease by about 30 million.
This major streamlining is being carried out as a result of client demand and the changing technology and markets. People want information as quickly and efficiently as possible. The digital solutions are currently the most suitable and least expensive for us and our clients.
As you know, Desjardins Group must deal with the changing technology and behaviour of its members, who use digital technology for their financial transactions.
All financial institution activities are affected to a certain extent by the changing technology and mail services. It's not only Desjardins members. All people who have bank accounts will use digital technology.
I'll let Mr. Brun finish.