Ms Mary Burke:

I think if you are the ... leading a team dealing with a bank, you should be the main point of contact with that bank. I don't have an issue with the fact that institutions might choose to escalate something. And if they choose to do so, I think the executive in the regulatory authority should engage with the supervisory staff and they should be part of informing that discussion. Personally, I believe they probably should be at the meetings or certainly some of them should be at the meetings. And that's very much the framework we have now. We have more directors, in fairness, so the responsibility at the executive level is more widely spread. And for want of a better term they are very much "embedded" in the supervisory regime. And that's my view as to how it should work. In terms of undermining staff - and I have had personal experience of this - if you are talking to a bank and they say to you, ''Oh well, we discussed that issue on the seventh floor'', you're immediately wrong footed. You're in a position where, one, you don't know whether they did discuss it, you don't know what they discussed, you don't know what the outcome is. And you're already very much already seen, from the bank's perspective, as somebody who's not in the loop.