EY CFO Outlook: From Stamps to E-Commerce with Peter Quinn, CFO, An Post

In this episode of the EY CFO Outlook Podcast, Peter Quinn, CFO of An Post joins host Dearbhail McDonald to talk about his career, the challenges An Post has faced, and why he’s optimistic about the future.

“When I started my career, it was before Microsoft Excel,” recalls Peter Quinn. “People thought technology would do away with jobs. Instead, it gave finance more firepower and made us more important.”

That same ability to see challenge as opportunity has defined Peter’s two decades as Chief Financial Officer of An Post. Since joining the company in 2004, he has navigated three of the biggest shocks of modern business - the financial crash, Brexit, and COVID - each one reshaping the world An Post operates in.

Today, Peter says An Post is no longer just the postman at the door. It’s a €1 billion business delivering state savings products, Amazon parcels, daily post, and rolling out electric vehicles. An Post, he says, is no longer just a postal service, it’s competing to be Ireland’s leader in home delivery.

They also discuss:

• How ‘An Post’ has shifted into parcels, logistics and financial services.
• The financial crash, Brexit, and the €100m cost of COVID.
• National postal operators still deliver half of all parcels and why An Post wants to stay on top.
• Believing in Sustainability, Peter talks about electric vans, closing the gender pay gap, and backing UN goals.
• How delegation and finance shape business decisions.
• Peter talks about sea-swimming with Alastair Campbell, a rugby tour in Uganda, and the optimism that drives him.

Transcript

George Deegan, Partner, Assurance and CFO Agenda Programme Sponsor, EY

Welcome to the EY CFO Outlook Podcast. In this series, we feature some of Ireland's leading CFOs, sharing interesting perspectives on a range of topics, from driving growth in their business to leading major finance transformation. 

I'm George Deegan, a partner and sponsor of EY’s CFO Agenda Programme. In this episode, we welcome Peter Quinn of An Post, Ireland's leading supplier of postal, e-commerce and financial services. 

Peter talks about navigating three of the biggest shocks of modern business, the financial crash, Brexit, and COVID - each one re-shaping the world An Post operates in and why he's optimistic about the future. 

Dearbhail, over to you.

Dearbhail McDonald
That's great. Thanks a million George, Peter Quinn, An Post’s CFO. You're very, very welcome.

Peter Quinn
Thank you.

Dearbhail McDonald
Listen, normally during the summer, it's pretty, pretty dry for business stories, but we were treated to a little bit of a blockbuster this summer when An Post was in the spotlight with a very public spat between the Minister for Communications and your Chief Executive David McRedmond. And there was a story that emerged that ye were in real financial trouble. Were you blindsided by what happened?

Peter Quinn
Not particularly, and I wouldn't describe it as a dispute. I think when the Taoiseach and the Minister came out very much in support of the Chief Executive and they're all on the one page now dedicated to the best interest of An Post and how it progresses.

Peter Quinn
The company isn't in financial difficulty. The source of the leak was a document which we've challenged and it was error ridden and unfortunate. So I would say it was an unfortunate set of circumstances. Business has been doing very well, recovered extremely well from the COVID period and the government are very supportive of the policies that have been pursued by the Chief Executive. So I think describing it as a spat would be over and I think they'd be on the one page.

Dearbhail McDonald
A little bit of a summer spat, I think David McRedmond, your CEO, said it was utter garbage about the company being on the brink of financial cuts.

Peter Quinn
He's right in that. And I think serious analysis. Post, the sector across Europe is challenged, but they're good businesses, very strong businesses and have loyal support from their customer base. And if you make the right strategic decisions about going into new lines of business like e-commerce, get your pricing strategy right and keep your consumer happy with the services, it can be a fine business and it is a fine business and will continue to grow.

Dearbhail McDonald
So do you think that that phrase, An Post, it's such a big brand and we have very, very set ideas about what An Post is and we're thinking it delivers letters, but actually it is now in effect a trading company with e-commerce at its core.

Peter Quinn
Yeah, it's a big industrial company. It has over a billion in turnover and loads of businesses have over a billion in turnover. One of the single price’s is €1.65 for a stamp. That shows you the scale of the volume and it covers a huge range of activities. So it's a complex group. And back to your earlier comment, we never have a dull moment with 10,000 employees. And I can assure you when you're in a leadership position, a company that size, it's never dull.

Dearbhail McDonald
Well, how then would you sort of describe it as a company now? Because obviously you've pivoted from that traditional understanding of a postal service as something that delivers letters. You're now at the heart of a global supply chain and logistics. It's e-commerce. I mean, who are your biggest customers?

Peter Quinn
Yeah, so right across the globe, you find that about 50% of home delivery is done by national postal operators. So the issue for us is to dominate home delivery. And then the question is what do you deliver to the home. And that has changed in nature. It's still very much letters and there's a real value in that. But it has increased now to all the e-commerce and all the results of internet shopping. So it has grown and expanded and changed. But we would like to see us as the dominant player in home delivery. And I think that we are. I think that we can stay there.

Dearbhail McDonald
Who are your big, big customers?

Peter Quinn
The customers, everybody's a customer. I go out socially in the evening. Everybody in the room is a customer. So everybody's a customer, so to speak. On the e-commerce side, the big customers, there will be globalization in e-commerce and there'll be some domination where people buy. So you've got the likes of Amazon, Temu, Shein, Every. And they'll become dominant sites for shopping. So people go in and shop there. That becomes our work then because we do the delivery. So they're big customers.

Dearbhail McDonald
And do you make big, profitable gains on those?

Peter Quinn
Yeah, we make profit at the contribution level on every piece of business we take on. Then the rest of the customers are the small businesses in Ireland are important customers and mail is important for them. Mail is important for them for marketing, billing, communication with their clients. Every householder is a customer and people still like sending letters, particularly for occasions like Valentine's, Mother's Day, Christmas. So the customers are wide range, but on e-commerce, certainly large global brands are going to dominate and we want to make sure we're delivering the service out of this day’s customers.

Dearbhail McDonald
And you can get into fashion with Vinted, bringing them on board..

Peter Quinn
Yeah, there's growth.

Dearbhail McDonald
And let's bring us back to letters because obviously there is a universal service obligation. So you are mandated as a state company to have a daily postal service, Monday to Friday at least. Would you like to see that changed or should it be changed?

Peter Quinn
Yeah, we think the freedom should be with the company to deliver what the consumer actually wants. So the consumer wants, sometimes the consumer wants next day delivery and wants fast service for internet shopping or for some letters. And they're prepared to pay money for that. We also think the digital stamp is important. It’s two euros, it’s higher than an ordinary stamp. And it gives you a notification that the letter has actually been delivered. So we think the consumer is prepared to pay more for faster deliveries. And then on a lot of regular mail that gets to their house, we don't, they don't say that they need it the next day. So we think the service should change to meet the consumer's demand.

Dearbhail McDonald
Would that cannibalize or eat into your other parts of your business?

Peter Quinn
No, I think it would just be a better service for the consumer and some mail like your ESB bill, or whatever, doesn't travel on a next day service. It's already a three day service. So we're not looking to dismantle the service in any way. We're just looking for it to be changed so we can meet what the consumer wants and make it more economical for us.

Dearbhail McDonald
That pivot that you and other postal services have made, you know, predominantly providing letters to multiple services, but also getting into the global logistics game or being at the heart as a trading company. Do you feel or do you think of yourself as a state-owned company?

Peter Quinn
No, we don't operate as a state-owned company, we’ve very high standards of corporate governance, a board of directors, we produce an annual report, we behave as if we were a PLC or whatever. So who the shareholder is, I don't think would determine how the company governs itself. 

Dearbhail McDonald
So have you good shareholders at the minute?

Peter Quinn
Absolutely, David has an excellent relationship with his shareholder.

Dearbhail McDonald
With the government... Talk to me about a big, big issue. And this may ultimately fall into the hands of the US Supreme Court. So who knows where it could go. But one of the really big issues affecting postal services, including An Post is the whole issue of the de minimis, the tariff regime that is now coming in from the US. So what is it less than eight hundred dollars, which would be your Temu, your Shein and a lot of your Amazon deliveries. How are you navigating that? 

Peter Quinn
Well, we've learned a lot from Brexit. I mean, the bigger issue is Brexit, to be to be honest about it. So customs changes that arose and were implemented and they affected Ireland more severely because Ireland was trading with Britain. So Brexit had a really big impact on trading between Britain and Ireland.

Dearbhail McDonald
And how does that manifest? 

Peter Quinn
Well it manifests itself for the consumer - some of the consumers will have had a bad experience with product being returned when they haven't actually been able to fill in all the details.

Dearbhail McDonald
How many would you still be returning on a weekly basis or a monthly basis?

Peter Quinn
It could be two or three thousand. And, but the issue for us is that it’s not uniform across the EU. So the implementation of the rules haven't been uniform across the EU. We've been physically visiting sites in other countries where they don't have the same strict regime and product is flowing between Britain and other nations without the same rigidity that Ireland is experiencing. So we would be campaigning for equal rules everywhere. And that's not the case at the moment. So I think if the rules were put in equally across the EU, then people would conform. Whereas we seem to have taken a very hard line.

Dearbhail McDonald
And what would have to change because three thousand parcels... So that's disruptive for consumers, for small businesses…

Peter Quinn
I think the nature of product that's sent through the post is different than what is sent through commercial lines. So I think it's that there should be some facilitation for post because the nature of what you put in is different. And a lot of it is gifting. A lot of it is person to person. So the rules were changed to make postal the same as the other services. I think that was a bit unfair. However, having made the change, if the rules are implemented uniformly everywhere, then I think everybody will be able to get to the same space on it and the consumer will be looked after.

Dearbhail McDonald
Talk to me about numbers. One of the reasons behind the, not the brat summer, but the spat summer was this idea that An Post was sort of being unduly supported by the elections. Talk me through that. What impact does that have on the bottom line?

Peter Quinn
We service the elections and that income is important to us. We do a good job on it. But it's not a once off or occurs every five years as a European election, local election, general election. And we plan to serve that.

Dearbhail McDonald
Another little election coming up soon.

Peter Quinn
A presidential election. And we plan to service those when they, when they arise. And if they're in our plans for the year, then we make the capacity to service them. If they're not going to occur in a year, we use the capacity for other services and we would have different view on our income streams and maybe have price increases earlier in the years when there isn't elections. So they're very much part of the business, an important part of the business. It is good income. And I think we service it quite well. But that was one of the errors, I think, in the analysis to describe it as ad hoc. It isn't ad hoc. They do recur and we plan for them when they arise.

Dearbhail McDonald
Talk to me about those income streams, because I suppose maybe ordinary consumers or customers of An Post have an idea of what it is that you do. But essentially, it's a, it's a group and there are different income streams within that. So you last year you surpassed a billion in revenue for the first time. Where was that coming from? Like as a CFO?

Peter Quinn
Well, the mails and parcels business would be the biggest part of the business. You know, and the letter income is the biggest part of that. It's very profitable still. So it's a good service. So letters, parcels, servicing, e-commerce. And then we have some important government contracts we service and distribute the sole distributor for state savings products. And that's an important contract.

Dearbhail McDonald
What's the scale of that, the savings products?

Peter Quinn
Well, there's 23 billion in retail savings in the state savings book. So it's big.

Dearbhail McDonald
That's significant.

Peter Quinn
We're the sole distributor. I think that's been very successful, particularly since the crisis when people the financial crisis people decided to save with state products. And that's gone very well. We distribute cash for social welfare recipients into the post offices. And there's still a large part of the community in Ireland like cash. They like getting their social welfare paid by cash. And that seemed to be an important part of the service. I mean, you can opt for EFT, but we do that.

Dearbhail McDonald
And that is actually because, you know, we've seen what, over 250 closures of post offices, including in many rural areas. And that provision that you have working with AIB and Bank of Ireland that people can access cash in in their post offices is really important. 

Peter Quinn
So we would be a very important financial services business by virtue, distributing, or being the sole distributor for state savings. I mean, the distributor of cash for social welfare. So we're in financial services by virtue of those and we’re in at scale. So the services we've added on and we service Bank of Ireland, AIB and hopefully the rest of the banks in terms of doing your transactions in a post office and consumers love that and the banks love it because it means their consumers have an extra range. And that's an important service. And we make a profit on that. And I think it demonstrates that the brand carries and that people like doing their business with An Post. Then we have our own financial services products and we're growing those as well.

Dearbhail McDonald
And how important is that growing of the financial services wing? If I can call it that, at a time when, you know, we're moving towards a cashless society. Like, are we going to see An Post mortgages anytime soon?

Peter Quinn
You know, the cashless society has been spoken about for years. It hasn't happened. A lot of people like cash. Cash is a medium of exchange. The amount of cash in circulation hasn't gone down. It might have gone down relative to other mediums of exchange, but it's still very prevalent. And there are areas where people are doing cashless tap. But there are other areas in the community where cash is still.

Dearbhail McDonald
So where do you see the capacity for growth? Like you've 10,000 in the group, I think about probably 170 in your finance function, which is not insignificant. But you've plans to reduce staff by maybe about what, 1,800 by 2028. So where do you see the growth? Where do you see the cutting back or the scaling back in resources or cost?

Peter Quinn
We plan to match the staff to the activity we have. And so, there's no plan to, the company doesn't exist to reduce staff. The company exists to match the right staffing to the services that are offered at any point in time. It's a reality that the volume of letters is in decline. So we have to adjust the staffing to match that.

Dearbhail McDonald
What are you looking at that - is that like seven percent year on year? Is it?

Peter Quinn
Yes, it's running at much less, a lower rate of decline now. And people are predicting that for years and nobody really knows where it's going. So we have to match staff to match what actually happens. And then on the other side, we've got to increase staff to service our e-commerce and parcel business. So the growth in that has been phenomenal in the last period and still growing. But that that might ease off and we'll plan staff to match that. We don't close any post offices. Post offices are largely franchise operation and the economics will determine how that's good. We would encourage government to use post offices more for communication with citizens and for putting government services in. And we think there's more products.

Dearbhail McDonald
So where do you think An Post needs to invest if it's becoming part of that global logistic network and wants to have dominance in that field here?

Peter Quinn
Invest in technology because that makes a huge difference to the business. So the post person who calls to your door now has, is technically enabled and he can scan the barcode and he can do an awful lot. So that investment, in that technology is important, investment in automation and sortation. And we've done so in parcels and we need to do more investment in facilities to be able to do the sortation of parcels in particular.

Peter Quinn
At an economic rate, we continuously invest in the premises we have to keep them in good standards. And you'll see on the road that we've invested heavily in electronic electric vehicles. We do all the deliveries in the city on electric vehicles. We think that the standards will go higher for everything on the road in the future. And we've invested ahead of that. So the business has a great capacity to take investment and it's all in good places.

Dearbhail McDonald
When you've been with the business for over 20 years now, what are the biggest changes that you have seen in that time as CFO?

Peter Quinn
The business has changed dramatically. I mean, we've had growth in turnover. We've had a change in the nature of the product that's being delivered to homes. That's been huge. We've had expansion in the post office, the range of services done, like financial services. Our investments, you know, in other activities like our insurance business is very successful. We've had quite a successful distribution business in the UK over the years.

Dearbhail McDonald
You chair that business?

Peter Quinn
Yes. And over the years we've had very, we did run the national lottery on behalf of the state and we made good capital gains on the investment in and out of that.

Dearbhail McDonald
Are you sorry to lose that?

Peter Quinn
Of course we did. But the gain we made on the sale is now owned by the French lottery was a business decision we had to make. So be it. But that's the privatization of the lottery is a great example for the state of how privatization can be a success because the state is actually gaining, gained its sale of the lottery in the initial phase and it's gained by increased money from good causes. So that was a success. And we made our, played our role and made our profit on it. We also were responsible in a large part for building the one for all gift voucher shop. And we did have a majority ownership on that, which we sold when the time was right and made a significant gain on that. So the group has demonstrated an ability to invest and make the right business decisions along the way.

Dearbhail McDonald
Often when I find when I'm speaking to CFOs, it nearly feels as if you're speaking to the CEO because your function is at the heart of every single decision that the business...

Peter Quinn
Yeah, and you're not really. The CEO has a different role and different market facing role and external and leadership and ideas. The CFO then has to take a different perspective and enumerate it.

Dearbhail McDonald
What do you see your role as the CFO because you're driving strategy, you're managing risk.

Peter Quinn
I participate in the management of the firm and I participate in the strategy. I enumerate the implications of business decisions. I relate to the board and I participate in ensuring we have good governance and high standards of manual reporting, et cetera, and financial planning. So it's a completely different role, but when they're in sync. It's best.

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Dearbhail McDonald
How important is it for you to delegate authority and delegate responsibility in order to provide that strategic overview for the business? You know, because traditionally people might think of the CFO role as the accountant role. You go through, you get the exams, you work up through the system. 

Peter Quinn
It’s really important, it is difficult because most CFOs find it difficult to want to delegate and give up paying attention to the detail. You can never stop paying attention to the detail. You do need to understand it. You do, however, need to grow teams of people and delegate. And that's important because you need to make available free time to do some thinking and to participate in dealing with business issues as they arise, because for sure they arise. And you don't know what next month's difficulty is. And if you don't have free time and capacity to deal with those, then you're going to fall over. So you have to grow people. Delegate. And the organization has done that very successfully, not just in the finance area, but the strength and the capacity in the organization in many areas has grown significantly in the last few years, which is great strength.

Dearbhail McDonald
What does a typical day look like when you get into the office in the morning? What's the first thing that comes at you?

Peter Quinn
One is never the same as the one the day before. That's for sure. And you have to leave capacity to deal with that. But we've had some very exciting things to do. It's exciting to see the growth of the turnover, the profits grow in the last three years have been very strong. And the development of the people and the move to our new head office at the EXO was very much a statement of progress. And for the future, I think that was important. And we've other things coming down the track now, the investment in technology, processing facilities will need to improve, which I think will be good. And the growth of our businesses like the insurance business and our distribution business in the UK.

Dearbhail McDonald
We are sometimes described as living in sort of the era of the polycrisis, you know, more black swans, than you can throw a stick at. But we have had major global events. We've had covid, you know, prior to that you had Brexit, you know, even going back during your tenure, you would have had the global financial crisis. And now you have a lot of other geopolitics coming out at you, technology coming out at you. How do you navigate that landscape and how do you prioritize? Because everybody's resources are limited.

Peter Quinn
Well it is interesting to stop every now and again and reflect and go back and the scale, I mean, the scale of the financial crisis was really serious for everybody. It dampened the economy. That means consumers were spending less. That impacted the environment we were working in. So that had a huge impact. For us, we grew our distribution of state savings. The post office served all of the community when social welfare was being  distributed and we coped with the economy being flat. So that was a big crisis to deal with. Covid was phenomenal. I mean, within two weeks, we moved everybody home and kept the service going. That meant paying your creditors, collecting money from your debtors and making sure we had the service on the road all the time. Loads of other service companies just closed down or folded up or took two months off. And we didn't. I think that the public respects what the firm did over those periods. But financially, it took a terrible blow out of the, out of the firm. It was a very expensive period to service because our employees turned up for work. But people weren't allowed to turn up for work. I mean, if you had Covid, you weren't allowed to turn up for work. And we continued the service. Therefore, we had to pay other people to do it. So it was very expensive.

Dearbhail McDonald
Did you take much of a hit?

Peter Quinn
Yeah, we did. I'd say 100 million was the cost of Covid. We didn't get any state support because the supports were geared in a different direction. And then people underestimate the impact of Brexit, I think, on Irish business and people. I think that was another crisis. So if you take those three, they're big enough to deal with. So there will definitely be some other issues in the future. I don't know what they're going to be. Hopefully we have the strength to navigate them. And I hope they won't be as impactful as the previous ones were.

Dearbhail McDonald
Can I just bring you back to Brexit? Because there was a time where you couldn't avoid the B word and it’s sort of fallen out a little bit of favor. But what do you think? What do you see as the continuing impacts of Brexit, particularly for SME and for our growth exports? 

Peter Quinn
Well there’s a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of administration and paperwork doing trade between Britain and Ireland, which wasn't there before and doesn't take place between Ireland and the EU. So that's a disadvantage to trade and rigidity. There's a lot of money paid by the Irish consumer on customs duties like most e-commerce. It's a significant amount – we are collecting that for the government - so it's a significant inflationary bill on the Irish consumer that wasn't there before. And I think, you know, these kind of people wanting to trade elsewhere, but Britain means that Britain Ireland trade has been dampened down significantly and that has a negative impact on the economy, which, you know, we are inclined, I think the commentary in Ireland is inclined to think that Brexit is a British problem, it's only the British economy has suffered. And I think that's misreading it. So we should endeavour to overcome that as best we can.

Dearbhail McDonald
And what role would An Post as a trading company as an intermediary, you know, between people buying and selling products and services? What do you see as your role in terms of breaking that?

Peter Quinn
Our job is to provide services to try and make it easier for trade. So SMEs, like if you take e-commerce, the amount of Irish firms that are actually supplying product onto the Internet is small and therefore the products are being replaced by imports.

Peter Quinn
And I think providing services and distribution channels for Irish SMEs to export would be one, for instance, and providing those export routes into the UK and making it easier to do the paperwork, get over Brexit. That's one of the services we do. We try and work with SMEs. And I think that's good for the economy and good for us because we get the distribution work.

Dearbhail McDonald
You have sort of the privilege, as CFO of An Post, of having a sort of a bird's eye view on the economy, literally a bird's eye view from the top floor of your fabulous building down at Dublin Port. When you look across the regulatory system more broadly in Ireland and in Europe, particularly, you know, when you look at Draghi's report and, you know, concerns about our productivity on the European continent, what do you think needs to change? What needs to happen to get us back in the game?

Peter Quinn
Well, the organisation, not just me, the organisation I've seen a lot of has seen a huge increase in regulatory burdens - across our financial services with the central bank across our relationship with ComReg and across the state itself and the creation of new agencies like NewERA, which was really set up originally to help the country through the financial crisis. But it has increased the regulatory burden on companies. So the political system recognises the disadvantage of what has happened and wants to address it. And the EU is also attempting to address it. And Irish commissioners are involved in that. I see it in the field. I haven't seen change yet. But I do think it's important that there is not deregulation or not an increase in risk. But a more streamlined approach and more and more analysis of what's material and what's not material rather than regulation for the sake of regulation.

Dearbhail McDonald
What keeps you awake at night Peter Quinn?

Peter Quinn
Well you worry about the business all day long and outside.. And that's the way it is. Chief executives do that. They never sleep. I would be thinking about it all the time. On balance, I'm very optimistic. I think the business has great core. It's got some huge assets like the brand and the actual sector that it's in and the scale it's in and the people it has. And I think the employee cadre. So I would be more optimistic about where it goes. 

Dearbhail McDonald
How important is sustainability to the brand? You know, you have made great strides in terms of gender representation throughout the company, on your EXCO. It's become something of a not quite a dirty word, but there's been a pushback against diversity and equality and sustainability. Do you think that's just a moment that we're in?

Peter Quinn
I think it is a moment. We embrace sustainability because it's good for the business. That's really why we did it. And if you take the ones that we’re strongest on concentrating on gender pay gap is nil. So we're strong on that. We embrace that. Business in the communities where the post offices are in the community. So that's one of the UN 17 goals. We're strong on that. We embrace that and we push that. On the emissions - we've got the electric fleet and we're probably 50 percent there. We’ll go all the way electric so that. We invest in the businesses and the head office are in is at the highest level of sustainability. So we see sustainability as a business strength. Actually, and we concentrate on that. The big disadvantage about the regulations and the reporting is that they’re over the top. They're complicated. They were so complicated. In fact, they had to withdraw them. And I think they did sustainability a disservice. My view is it would be best to leave sustainability with industry to get on with its own and good businesses will embrace this.

Dearbhail McDonald
Self-regulation or sort of.

Peter Quinn
Yeah, I think that industry and good businesses will adapt the sustainability agenda and put it to the forefront. And industry is the key to getting it done. Regulation won't get it done. And therefore, I would ease off on the regulation and I would maximize the benefits of it, like there's a lot of science behind it - the UN 17 goals are very scientifically worked out. We've adapted five of them. We're pushing it forward. We were doing that before any regulation.

Dearbhail McDonald
Would you prefer to be spending less resource on the reporting?

Peter Quinn
Yeah, absolutely. We are going to do the reporting. We do an awful lot of the reporting anyway. And we will probably get ahead of the process on that. So we would like to. I think regulation created a fear in industry about can you meet the reporting deadlines? And it took the eye off the ball. Whereas, in fact, if you hold out sustainability as a good positive thing for industry, good businesses will go for it and they'll report properly. So I  would take the regulation, the reporting off the agenda for a couple of years and allow industry progress. I think that that would be best.

Dearbhail McDonald
And today, as we meet, there are hundreds of young kids coming into EY to start their career. For young and emerging CFOs, for young and emerging people going into the finance function, what do you think is the most important thing they need to know?

Peter Quinn
Well, I'll always promote it as a good career route. People will do their own thing, different thing. I have my own family members coming through, choosing different things. I think the thing for them to do is I would take it seriously, embrace it, make sure you put the work in because it's competitive. It's pretty competitive. It’s going to be competitive. But in the development of it, leave space to learn as much outside of the pure straight line finance areas that you can. And some people will learn more and some people will be more suitable to be just numeric. It's a lot to do with personality.

Dearbhail McDonald
Would you encourage young people into it, especially when people are worried about AI going to take their jobs, particularly in finance functions? You know, do you see AI as something that's going to free you up to do the more strategic?

Peter Quinn
That's been around for years. Like I started my career before Microsoft Excel. And I think at the time they were attempting Lotus 1, 2, 3 and computers and they were going to do away with everybody's job. And of course, that didn't happen. What it did actually was created more firepower for the finance community. And the finance persons became more important in business because they had better tools and they were even more effective. So I wouldn't be worried about jobs being lost through AI. I think it's a great discipline and it's a great starting point. And once you do it, then expand your mind and take whatever opportunities come your way.

Dearbhail McDonald
Speaking of expanding your mind, I think that you were last seen bobbing in the Irish Sea with none other than Alastair Campbell. What do you do outside of life as a detox?

Peter Quinn

You can’t also finish that story without also stating that Alastair Campbell posted the photograph on his own Instagram and got three hundred thousand likes in about three days. So that's the story on that one.

Dearbhail McDonald
Did you enjoy that visibility?

Peter Quinn
My youngest son was horrified to see his father's photograph seen by three hundred thousand people. So, yeah, I've always been a sea swimmer. I don't do the winter. I do the summer. And I do Christmas Day. I've always done Christmas Day, but I'll do the summer. I have my favourite spots. So I'll do sea swimming. That would be one of my sports when I was younger.

Dearbhail McDonald
And sport is a big, big part of your life. I know you're just back, actually - were you in Uganda?

Peter Quinn
I was in Uganda with Black Rock Rugby Club. I had forty nine people, a great tour, big match, great crowd at the match. But we also contributed where we could in communications and charity and went to another region and helped them develop their rugby and their skills. And we had a great trip in terms of having a good time, but also adding value. And it'd be interesting to see how it impacts all the boys that were on the tour with us over their lives. But Ugandans are beautiful people, accepted our generosity and opened their minds to us. So it was fabulous.

Dearbhail McDonald
Do you worry about the broader geopolitics? Not just as an executive, but just as a citizen. Do you worry about the moment that we're in more broadly?

Peter Quinn
Yeah, but we've, you know, it's never been great, has it? And when you see the amount of poverty in Uganda and a country that's got a rainy season, it’s green, it's luscious and has fabulous facilities like Victoria and the Nile and all the rest. And then the poverty over the place. How does that happen? And then you go on your flight on the way home, you go into Doha Airport and you see all the extravagant wealth and then back home to your own comfort. So I can't fix all of that. I mean, I am very interested in all that stuff and hopefully it gets to a better space in the future.

Dearbhail McDonald
What does the future look for you after An Post? Would you say like you're very actively involved? You know, you've been involved with Children at Risk in Ireland. Do you think it's important to give back and have a bigger picture?

Peter Quinn
I'm certainly not going to stop doing things, whenever that period happens. I want to be active in as many activities as I can be. I obviously enjoy business, enjoy the social aspect of it as well. So, yeah, I haven't formulated plans, but I'm not at that point at this stage.

Dearbhail McDonald
In 10 years time, how will we describe An Post as a business?

Peter Quinn
I think it will still be a very important brand. It will still have a very important place in its distribution business. I don't think it'll be in the same format that it is at the moment. It needs investment. So I'm not too sure that that's going to happen in the current guise. So I think it will be, it will be still significant. It will be probably larger than it is. It will probably have more activities, but I'd say it will be structured differently into the future. It's financial services business, I hope will grow, but I'm not sure that can be married to a logistics business forever. And then the post office. I think it's very dependent on what the state wants to do with post offices and how it wants to relate with citizens.  Hopefully they decide to use it.

Dearbhail McDonald
Before I let you go, what is your own favourite podcast and what book would you take away to a desert island?

Peter Quinn
I'm not a great podcast listener. Obviously, Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, my youngest son, encourages me in that because he's now my swimming pal. And on books, I read autobiographies. I like sports autobiographies, sports people and political ones. I've read a lot of the UK and Irish ones. If I was going just to clear my mind, I'd take a murder mystery and sit on the beach and that would be it.

Dearbhail McDonald
That would be it. And my final question, you can have dinner with any person from history. Who would it be?

Peter Quinn
Oh, wow, that's too hard.

Dearbhail McDonald
We'll leave you with David McRedmond for now. Peter Quinn, thank you so much for joining us today.

Peter Quinn
Thank you very much. I'm delighted to have had the opportunity. Thank you.