Mr. David Duffy:

I will comment on that question and then ask Mr. Byrne to comment on SMEs. To be open and frank, the informal side of it has been a concern. There was risk aversion in the restructuring of AIB. Certainly in the early period, people were afraid to bring some credits to the table and were risk-averse in that respect. Throughout the past six months, whenever I have met many of the Deputies here and others in Government, I have asked those present to bring to us by name any individual company which has not been able to access credit so we can tackle it. I have given those present my number and e-mail address to this end. On a positive note, I received notification of a significant number of cases over that time and we were able to resolve many of them satisfactorily. We have been trying to specifically address the informal world and have spoken with Deputies and the ISME representative group.

We have met with the ISME executive and every other institution in the financial services world. As simple and as unsophisticated as it is, we gave them our card and stated they can bring anybody to us, from the Taoiseach all the way down through any other institution. Some of those in this room have brought us people who were not able to access credit and we have been able to resolve the matter. We recognise a challenge exists at the informal level and this is one of the initiatives we have been rolling out. As I mentioned earlier, there are also all of the other educational initiatives and travelling throughout the country.

The executive, which numbers an additional four or five people, does not meet at the head office in Bank Centre; it meets only in branches. For our monthly executive meetings we travel to a branch. The two most recent meetings have taken place in Kilkenny and Cork. We meet the staff during the day and spend four or five hours afterwards with small and medium enterprises and individual customers. At the most recent meeting in Cork we met 50 customers over four hours. We do not present; instead, we ask the customers what we can do better. To give a level of comfort, the executive will be on the road for the bulk of the time in direct contact with retail and small and medium enterprise customers throughout the country. We think this is the best way to learn. This is an indication of the attempts we are making to deal with the informal world. I will ask Mr. Byrne to comment specifically on the definition of a formal application.