Ms Adrienne Murray:

I thank the Chairman. In response to his first question on the banks and the desirability of automatic referral, to date we have engaged with the banks in a goodwill manner. They have been helping us to promote the scheme and, as I stated, the Minister, Deputy Bruton, held a round-table meeting last week that was attended by us and representatives of some other initiatives such as the Credit Review Office and the partial loan guarantee scheme. In addition, the small to medium-sized enterprise, SME, banks were also present. He asked us to bring along concrete proposals as to how the banks could help Microfinance Ireland. We are of the firm belief that there may be a process in this regard for the customer. While we can do a lot of promoting and so on in this regard, the challenge really is how to make it seamless and easier for the customer. We hope that over the next two weeks, we will carry out, on an individual bilateral basis, a small look-back over the SME banks' declined applications over the past four to six weeks. It may be possible for them to contact those customers and explain to them that MFI is a Government initiative, and asking them for their permission to pass on their customer documentation. We are not looking for the bank's information in the context of data protection rules or anything like that. Instead, we seek customers' consent to pass on their application and supporting documentation directly to Microfinance Ireland. Thereafter, we can use our own assessment slide rule, for want of a better term, given our different appetite for risk and can then ascertain whether this is where the potential applicants can come to us directly. It is early days and we have not even put pen to paper in respect of the process and so forth. The Minister, Deputy Bruton, has asked us to report back on the pilot by the end of December. In the future, however, if the pilot is successful, it would be interesting to have inclusion of customer consent at the outset of the bank application. In other words, should the application with the bank be unsuccessful or only partially successful, the customers would give approval or consent to the bank to pass on automatically their documentation to MFI. That is the concrete proposal we brought forward to the aforementioned forum.

The question on the database is interesting. We get a lot of telephone calls and, in particular, we see an uplift in them when we have an advertising campaign. To be honest with the Chairman, we simply did not have the resources. We had six weeks in which to get up and running and had a different website. While it served us well, it did not have the functionality of creating databases, storing information, etc. We have more work to do on our website yet but we consider it to be one of our main channels of delivery. We do not have a network. The county enterprise boards are the delivery channel and a strong promotional channel but we believe, like many others, that the direct channel offers great potential.

It offers us the opportunity, as the Chairman stated, to capture inquiries, either coming through the website or from elsewhere, and then follow them up to determine why they did not pursue the application. Many would say we would nearly know. We have been monitoring those calls and we get a fairly strong indication when we take the name and address over the telephone as to whether it looks like a concrete application. In terms of sending an inquiry to us via our website, in the future our new website will allow us greater opportunity to monitor those inquiries and whether they turn into solid sales leads.