A Multi-Faceted Wordsmith

Orla O’Sullivan’s first story for ABC.com was picked up online and on television. In her first day as Personal Finance Editor of Ireland’s top newspaper, The Irish Independent, she had a business brief picked up by national radio.

She has repeatedly disproven the belief, common in consumer media, that business is boring. Rather, she has displayed a knack for turning potentially dry topics into water-cooler conversation.

Her prescient 2005 lead story in the Irish Independent indicating that her native country was heading over the same subprime cliff as the U.S. became a national talking point.

A refusal to be dull informs all her work, whether in public relations, the editing of technical trade journals, or writing for The New York Times or The Times of London.

Recent projects for corporate clients include a lively website on money management for young people and a series of white papers and position pieces for global technology companies. These span topics from compliance and risk management to application development environments.

Orla knows what editors want and how to pitch it.

She is at ease operating at the highest levels, having interviewed everyone from CEOs to celebrities and heads of state. Orla readily builds rapport in live interviews: for panel discussions; radio; online videos; and podcasts. Her broad experience also includes generating blogs, press releases, brochures, and other promotional materials.

Whatever the medium, the essentials of story telling are the same. Orla was explaining everything from credit scoring to mortgage-backed securities years before most people had heard of them, and was well ahead of the personal thrift trend, among others.

The mortgage industry, retail banking technology and personal finance are three areas of expertise, but Orla has written on an exhaustive list of subjects for some 30 media outlets.

She marries an understanding of today’s hot financial tech topics—such as social media marketing, big data, the cloud, cyber security and disaster recovery—with an appreciation of the constraints under which financial institutions operate, such as regulatory compliance and necessary integration of legacy technologies and business lines.

She holds an M.A. in Journalism from Dublin City University, Ireland, and several vocational qualifications. She is fluent in French and Gaelic with a smattering of other languages.