Post Office goes on a modernisation mission

UK-based postal and financial services retailer, Post Office, is using OutSystems to power innovation.

As part of the company’s strategic investment in new technology to help modernise its business, Post Office engaged OutSystems to help deliver an initial application use case: a new B2C native mobile app for Android and iOS to promote the company’s financial products for travel. The new app allows customers to buy and manage a Travel Money Card and to take out Travel Insurance at the same time. In just four months, the new team completely developed, tested, and released the app—an achievement almost unheard of for financial services products. These products are subject to numerous regulations and controls, which the team managed to swiftly navigate.

“As a commercial organisation, our challenge as a company is always to innovate more quickly and with more agility,” said Henk Van Hulle, Managing Director Group Digital and Innovation at the Post Office. “We needed a development platform that offered advanced security, code reusability, and allowed for greater data insight to help us get to market faster. We are always striving to build our products and services around our customers—not just today’s, but tomorrow’s, too—and so we want our employees to feel empowered to find and use the solutions that help them do that. OutSystems lets us develop innovative and necessary products and get to market faster, while enabling integration with complex back-end systems.”

The addition of OutSystems as the company’s new development front-end creates a foundation for the Post Office’s future digital roadmap, one that will create new revenue streams and channels that it can leverage at its more than 11,500 branches to serve the millions of Post Office customers across the UK. The new native mobile app has been adopted by more than 100,000 customers within three months of release.

Nick Pike, Regional Vice President of Sales at OutSystems, worked closely with Post Office throughout the initial project. “What this newly created Post Office team delivered in such a short time is a testament to what an agile and dedicated team can do with a robust, full-stack, low-code development platform. With the help of OutSystems, Post Office is revitalising its socially-conscious portfolio of products and services and building new revenue streams with low-code as the cornerstone for the delivery of their digital strategy,” he says.