Mr. Peter O'Mahony:

On the reluctance to borrow, Deputy Collins referred to Mr. McMonagle and Mr. Vander Elst taking a couple of hours out of their day. It is difficult for an entrepreneur to do that. All business people in Ireland have got used to the fact that if you want to apply for a loan, you have to fill out an eight-page form. If you are working hard and doing a full 12-hour day, you are coming home in the evening to face this form that is just an unending list of questions for you to fill out.

We are different. The quickest our loan application form has ever been filled out is 37 seconds, and we have a timer on the website. What we are trying to do there is get rid of all the friction in signing up. However, it is hard, until we are fully established, for businesses to realise that there will not be an eight-page form to fill out. A business owner may send the form to the bank, fold his or her arms and think the job is done, but the bank will come back to him or her two weeks later looking for supplementary information, and then it will change the rules on what it was looking for in the first place and how the business owner will guarantee the loan. We have tried to make the application as simple as possible. On day one, our application form was four pages long. We found that 60% to 70% of the applicants were skipping out of the website or leaving our website on page 2. Therefore, we sat down and had the brainwave of making it a two-page application form. But then, of course, everyone left on page 1. What we did thereafter was to have a single-page application form, and one can go through all the fields in less than a minute. That gets one onto the system and allows one to understand what we will be looking for as supplementary information, and we give the full list. We never ask for anything in excess of what we have listed as the documents we will require to put the loan together. It is a learning curve. For me, as an entrepreneur over the years, filling out those long forms was just an absolute headache.

Regardless of crowd-funding, it would be helpful if the pillar banks standardised their forms so that when I apply for a loan, I could fill out one form, photocopy it, drop it in to the four or five different banks and get them competing against each other for my business. At present, all the formats are different and the information required is in a different layout. It would be simple to do. I accept it would be a big printing job, but it would be simple to standardise the application form for a loan.