Mr. David Duffy:

I think my greatest concern relates to what is necessary to run a bank well and that starts with culture. I think there was an organisation that had been through too much change in leadership, had been through a shocking crisis in terms of shock to the system of internal as well as external. There was a huge amount of uncertainty. There was a fear about the individual roles. It was so much of a distraction that we needed to be able to be very clear up front that the bank is not there for itself, it's not there to worry about itself; it is there to serve customers and delivering a customer culture. In other words, every thing that gets done in the bank, every process it serves, the customer had to be prioritised. How could we do that? That meant customers not just in the normal course of banking, but it meant the significant population who were in distress and arrears at the time for which we had no capability ... so creating that culture which recognised that the priority was not necessarily an internal focus, the priority was an external focus and that meant shifting the culture of the bank to an external lens and then applying all the lessons that we needed to recover the bank to that lens. So that would be the first issue.

The second issue was, I think, operational risk. You had a bank that had been through so much recent turmoil, it was not yet certain of the outcome. We had very many staff leaving, senior people leaving, and an awful lot of the organisation was in stasis. It was unable to move, it wasn't sure which direction to go, it wasn't sure of its future. So that uncertainty and operational risk that it generates ... Are people doing their job? Are they managing the processes? Are they implementing the controls that we should have?

The third area would have been the functioning of the bank in its purpose, which primarily is to lend to customers, that risk aversion was very material at the time. People weren't sure of what the capital structure was, whether our funding was stable and, therefore, were very, very adverse to taking decisions on lending. So there was a very significant adversity to taking risk in the bank and that aversion meant that I couldn't be sure where the revenue profile and the cost profile was going to end up in the first six to 12 months. So I think if ... you know, I'd want to reflect in time if I whether there was any change in that priority but I think culture is overarching. It's overwhelming in terms of success or failure and then the other two follow from that.