Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 31 October 2012

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform

Operations and Functioning of AIB: Discussion

1:55 pm

Mr. David Duffy:

If the Deputy could refer us to someone following the pitch, that would be advantageous. To give the committee the concise and explicit version of what we have just done in Asia, where we met investors at the IMF, and two weeks previously at the Merrill Lynch conference, the world of banking is structurally changing. UBS, with 10,000 people, changed as a result of the regulatory consequences of old banking models. Pay scales, business models are changing with Basle III and everything else is changing. Analysts and those who examine these investments, from Canadian long-only to other short-term venture capital firms, are looking at a yield. The highest value is a simple and transparent bank. The comment has been made to us many times. We will create a model of a bank that is a low-cost provider of a utility type service of payments and cash management, with strong SME capability. It will primarily be a domestic bank, offering the most advanced technology to facilitate consumers banking when they want, how they want and what they want rather than having to come to the bank and queue up. We have the technology. The cost, ease-of-use and ubiquity of the technology for all products should be comparable to the disintermediation threat of PayPal and others coming across the Internet to compete in that space. The cost-income ratio must be in the low 40s whereas banks today are in the high 40s and early to mid 50s. It must be an incredibly efficient, low-cost model. It must offer a simplified range of products. We have a large number of mortgages, whereas it should be a handful of mortgages. What will investors think of a bank with a stable market share, with a transparent and simple to understand balance sheet and products that are simple, a bank that is low-cost, high tech and is competitive in terms of ease of use of facilities with anything that is disintermediated, with a strong capital tier 1 ratio and a stable annuity yield of between 8% and 12%?

If we can present that to investors, what will they think? Investors will think that is very attractive.

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