Mr. Terence O'Rourke:

Well, there'd be a number of things, a lot of things done internationally, because it wasn't just in Ireland that banks failed, that is a global issue and there's been a lot of work done by a number of groups saying, "How can we enhance corporate reporting?" And one of the issues I said earlier that the chairman of the IASB said is that financial numbers only tell so much about a company. There's other things you need about a company, other than what its assets and liabilities are, what its income and expenditure are.

You need to know its business models more, you need to know its risks. You need to be able in some way to measure the environmental impact of a company. You need to be able to measure the social impact of a company. And therefore there's a lot of work being done on can we develop corporate reporting on top of a very sound basis of the numbers being done in a certain way, can we give other information to people that'll help them better understand a business and the risks it face? That work is being done by the international integrated reporting council I talked about. It's being done by the financial stability board of the bank of international ... or the BIS in Basel, which are coming out, enhanced disclosure task force, which again has got a lot of work done on the additional disclosures that banks should make of the risks they're running. And there's now a fairly broad set of additional risk disclosures which are being developed and are being trialled with banks to see can they produce this information in an understandable and consistent manner. And that work is going ahead very well. I think in the future you'll see that banks will report a wider range of things, more than just the numbers. So that looking back on the crisis you'll say, "We believe the numbers were properly prepared in accordance with the rules that were there. The issue was: that was not enough for people to understand what was going on." We need a wider picture, which can't all be captured in numbers. They need to be captured in more narrative, telling the story in a broader sense. And what ... to have that consistent so we compare Bank A with Bank B in different countries and different situations, there needs to be a fairly comprehensive set of things that banks can and can't do, and that work is ongoing at the moment.