Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 7 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Robert Gallagher:

Chairman, just to pick up on your questions and to link to Mr. Torpey's comments, there is no question that both the business and commercial bank and the residential part of the bank in Ulster Bank, sought to win domestic deposits. And if you think about the challenge for a challenger bank, versus the incumbent two banks, is that the challenger bank tends to have less deposit base than the two incumbent banks and the attraction of winning lots of small depositors is you have a stickiness about your deposit base, which helps your loan-to-deposit ratio. So there was an active strategy both in the retail bank and the commercial business bank to win the completeness of a customer proposition and that is, deposits, clearing accounts and lending and that was the strategy as evidenced by the branch openings around the country. So our growth strategy was about winning more customers in the completeness of our relationship with those customers, not about winning more and more property-lending business.

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