Mr. Terence O'Rourke:

I certainly understood the reasons why it was introduced. The benefits of accounting standards is that they are objective and what .... IAS 39 was certainly a very objective standard. It tried to remove any subjectivity, in other words, people deciding, well, it's ... we'll put away this amount this year, and this amount another year. And the problem beforehand was that people were putting away different amounts in different places, so analysts, in trying, and investors trying to understand the financial statements of banks were coming up with different answers. When IAS 39 came along, the benefit was you knew that the only things that were provided for were incurred losses. Now, there is , I mean, there is, we grew up with the concept of prudence in banking and prudence was this concept of putting away more money but there is another side to the coin, which is the objective, and it's good to have objectivity as well. I think what ... this debate has now moved on, the IASB are moving towards an expected loss model. But it was one of the things about an expected loss model, is you only provide for expected losses, you don't provide for unexpected losses. It's still got to be done on the basis of evidence of credit deterioration. So, expected loss is not providing for unexpected loss then, it's not back to the old general provisioning, we just put away whatever we think we should put away. And, therefore, I think there, there was definitely merit in IAS 39 and I think where we're getting to now is probably a more sensible situation.