Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. David Duffy:
To be honest, Deputy, I can't be absolutely clear about that because I didn't have enough knowledge of that marketplace but I can tell you that from a distance when you have so much competition with so many banks - there was a huge number of banks all offering 100% mortgage type things at high LTV - it created a market environment where people were forced to compete. And I can say one thing that I take away from that environment, what it did was drove market share chasing and margins come down and products were inappropriately priced. And that is where you have got high volume trying to compensate for what was a declining margin over ten years. And in today's environment we have barely crawled out of it, and we are already starting to talk about how much all the margins or rates should be cut. We have to be very careful. The issue is not so much whether you are volume selling; the issue is concentration risk and the issue is having appropriate margin to have capital to protect you in the downturn. That's my observation from that period.
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