Mr. Alan Merriman:

The culture of any normal SME businessman, businesswoman, if they're running their business, they want to make it as efficient and as lean and as profitable, within reason, and that's how those TBAs managed their businesses. They managed it in a context. The controls were there. All credit underwriting was centralised. No branch manager, no person at the front, could write a loan. It had to be underwritten at head office level. But did a branch manager have an incentive to develop business, to do business development? Absolutely.