Mr. Frank Daly:

I think you have to ... when you ... when you look at what came across to us, certainly you had a lot of debtors and some of them debtors of ... with very big exposures, who had exposures across the banks. So there was ... they were dealing with several banks and I have no doubt at all that the banks were in competition.

I don't want to get into making sort of qualitative, giving qualitative opinions about the banks, but there was certainly a question of, as I said earlier, a wall of money being available to all of the banks and, to a certain extent, the banks just chasing investments for that money.

And it was quite clearly the situation that if you had one particular bank that was being very, very successful at that, then questions were being asked of the other banks by their shareholders as to, "why you are not ... why are you not chasing this? Why are you not growing at the same rate? Why is your lending" ... because everybody believed, of course, that in that whole area of property lending that there was no downside.

So, yes, there was competition right across the banks.