Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Cormac McCarthy:

Exceptions had always been part of the norm and as I said earlier on, there were portfolio management limits. The typical mortgage was arranged around a standard model but every mortgage was individually negotiated so there would have been latitude allowed but that was only at the centre, so typically the tolerances were 10% loan-to-value and 10% debt service ratio. And by and large those were adhered to. I have acknowledged that in some circumstances we did let standards slip but by and large we were satisfied that the exceptions were within portfolio management limit tolerances and that they were justifiable. The experience of the Ulster Bank mortgage portfolio as it has worked through the cycle has been not particularly different to the rest of the market so there's no particular skew that I'm aware of in the Ulster Bank mortgage portfolio versus the rest of the market. So the exceptions were not the norm but exceptions were a factor of the industry for some time beforehand, they didn't arise subsequent to 2004.

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