Mr. Jim Brown:

In terms of the history of the bank, it has operated here for 177 years and is committed to the market. As I mentioned in my opening address, there are two aspects that we are dealing with: addressing the legacy issues of the past and also being able to build a sustainable business for the future.

There is an ongoing review of RBS in looking at whether it should split into a good bank and a bad bank and in that scenario looking at moving impaired assets out of RBS. We are involved in that process, but no conclusion has yet been reached. We expect the review to be completed probably sometime in the next month or two. In the meantime, from my perspective, we will carry on delivering on the strategy we have outlined and will continue with the progress we are delivering.

In terms of the IT incident, we have not experienced a fallout from a business perspective, as can be seen from our results. If one looks at the deposit numbers, for example, our deposits have risen by 12% year-on-year. That is as a result of the good relationship we have with our customers, the goodwill shown by our customers during that period and also the support of the staff to minimise any impact on our customers. That said, following on from the initial incident, the root cause of the problem has been fixed and we are working with RBS on an ongoing basis to ensure the resilience of all the IT systems across Ulster Bank and RBS and that they are improved.

The third point was around the legal entity. There had been some discussion of this when I first arrived in Ireland. It primarily came as a result of the fact that up until ten or 15 years ago Ulster Bank had always operated under one entity which was separated into two legal entities. Therefore, we did a refresh as to what was the best structure under which we should operate. The current legal entity structure is the one within which we intend to stay. We will have an Ulster Bank Ireland Limited entity and also Ulster Bank Limited as a separate legal entity. There will be no change from the current position.