Mr. David Duffy:

Deputy Murphy raised several issues which are quite particular with regard to how we are changing the culture of the bank. In the past people were paid for volume of sales and this is one of the easiest ways to damage a bank's health if it is without regard to the creditworthiness or ability to repay of the customer and is a case of piling them high and selling them by volume. This is the wrong motivation for banking.

Banking is very basic. One should know one's customer, and our ability to have people in the branch network who know their customers was severely weakened during the time it was felt people had to move to head office to progress their careers. To answer the Deputy's specific question, we are taking this skill-set back from head office and putting it into the branches. We are returning the SME experience which was severely weakened to the branch network and bolstering it with expertise we must source from outside the bank because much of it had left. We are taking these two steps to return to the basic banking model, which is that people in the field know their customers and make judgments. We are adding to this a level of approval which has been difficult to discuss because in a regulatory environment such as ours which is changing, requests are made to remove individual authorities from the branch network. We have been working on standardisation, simplification and a delegated level of authority which we can review monthly in head office but a stand-alone decision can be made locally with a customer in a branch. It is early days but we imagine in the next six to 12 months there will be a material improvement in terms of knowing the customer, accessing local credit decisions and having the authority to make such a decision without referral to head office.