Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Michael Buckley:

-----2005. I felt that - just to give an overall comment - I felt that achieving double digit growth was a realistic target, that it was stretching to some extent, but that it was realistic and if I may take that in the context of the Republic of Ireland division, I suppose to summarise the reason why I would have thought that there was good growth available in the Irish division. Twofold: one, the demographics that I referred to before. Second of all, a point I mentioned in my opening statement, that, while we had a big share of the current accounts of households and individuals and of the working accounts of companies and the strong position with the SMEs that, on a product-by-product basis, we actually had a much lower market share. So let's say in mortgages, while we had 30% of all the current accounts in the country, we had 16% market share in mortgages. So, there was inherent growth potential and when we made an assessment of what would be the net result of doing better on that front, but also reorganising ourselves, for instance by centralising the way in which we dealt with producing mortgages and producing a better proposition, that we would get there. Double digit growth in the sense of 10% or 11% or 12% per annum, in the context of the economy we had, was not a wild or strange target to have would be my view, even still looking back at it now.

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