Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 5 November 2014
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform
Overview of Banking Sector: Bank of Ireland
4:35 pm
Mr. Richie Boucher:
One of the key things is the subject about which we have just been talking - the funding structure. The banks should really fund their loan books from customer deposits. The capital structures are very different. At the time, banks throughout the world had capital ratios of approximately 5% or 6%. We are running at approximately 14%. That is the level of capital we have available. We have restructured the way in which our boards function. We have a very specific risk committee. We looked at one of our problems or issues - the structure of our balance sheet in percentage terms. When one's balance sheet is very big, it has the potential to fall and we have shrunk the business. We have had to get out of businesses in which the asset selection was good but we could not support capital liquidity.
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