An Post Money: Banking on a National Brand

Role

As Director of Product & Technology, I led the product design, UX strategy and agile devilopmet for the An Post Money app — the mobile banking platform for Ireland's national postal service as it repositioned itself as a serious challenger in Irish retail banking. The engagement covered the full product design lifecycle: from strategy and user research through to design system, UX delivery, and feature roadmap.

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Challenges

An Post Money had significant brand equity but a fragmented digital product portfolio that was holding back growth:

• Fragmented Product Landscape: Existing apps were standalone, branded off-the-shelf solutions that lacked coherence and failed to leverage the strength of the An Post brand.
• Competitive Pressure: Revolut and N26 were rapidly gaining share among younger Irish consumers with polished, mobile-first experiences that set a new bar for digital banking.
• Diverse User Base: An Post's customer base ranged from digitally confident urban professionals to older, less digitally confident users in rural communities — the app needed to work for both.
• Underutilised Physical Network: 930+ post offices represented a unique competitive advantage that wasn't being surfaced in the digital experience.

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Contribution

1. Product Strategy & Roadmap:
   • Defined the phased product roadmap — establishing Current Account and Currency Card as Phase One, with Money Manager (open banking), Savings Jars, Round Up, and Money Mate (youth account) in subsequent phases.
   • Developed the 'digital banking with a human touch' positioning — combining mobile-first features with deep integration of An Post's 930-branch physical network.
2. UX Design:
   • Redesigned the onboarding and KYC journey to minimise drop-off — plain language, reduced steps, and a document upload flow that worked reliably across device types.
   • Designed the Money Manager open banking feature (powered by Tink) — allowing customers to link accounts from AIB, Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB, Revolut and N26 alongside their An Post account.
   • Designed Savings Jars and Round Up as the emotional core of the app — tactile, goal-oriented features that gave users a sense of financial progress.
   • Extended the design system to accommodate Money Mate (7-15 year olds) — a distinct age-appropriate UX within the same overall brand framework, designed and tested with children and parents in parallel.
3. Design System:
   • Built a component-based design system — connecting design, specification, and developer handoff — enabling An Post's product team to extend and maintain the platform independently.

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📱 Industry-Leading Launch

The An Post Money app launched in August 2021 to strong market reception, with An Post's Managing Director describing it as "industry leading — simple and seamless technology built on our trusted brand." The app established An Post Money as a credible challenger in Irish retail banking.

🏦 Open Banking for All of Ireland

The Money Manager open banking feature — extended in partnership with Tink to be available free to all Irish consumers regardless of their bank — positioned An Post Money as a genuinely public-interest product and generated significant positive press coverage as a differentiator against purely commercial challengers.

👧 Money Mate: Financial Literacy at Scale

The Money Mate youth account (7-15 year olds), with its dedicated app experience and Mastercard Debit Card, gave An Post a product for building long-term relationships with young Irish consumers — and parents — at the earliest stage of their financial lives.

🎯 1 Million Customer Target

The app provided the product foundation for An Post Money's five-year ambition of growing from 250,000 to 1 million active customers — across current accounts, currency cards, credit cards, and loans.

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The gallery showcases the An Post Money app across key user journeys — from the streamlined current account onboarding and KYC flow through to the Savings Jars goal-setting experience, Money Manager open banking dashboard, Round Up automation, and the Money Mate youth account interface. The An Post brand's distinctive amber and green palette is applied throughout a clean, accessible mobile design system built to work for users across the full spectrum of digital confidence.