Mr. Ed Farrell:

The greatest change has been in the regulatory structure. Since moving from the Registrar of Friendly Societies to the Registrar of Credit Unions within the Central Bank, there has been a rewrite of the rule book on how credit unions operate. There has also been a great deal of hardship for them, their business, paid employees and volunteers.

There has been a huge change in governance, which as Mr. Kevin Johnson said earlier we have bought into and implemented. The additional paperwork and regulatory burden in respect of the smaller loans has made it much more difficult for credit unions to do character based lending, with which traditionally they would have been very good. They would have been able to lend on a person's previous record of repaying his or her loan and from knowing the character of a person from the community of the credit union but now lending is based on rules, regulations and paperwork. If the credit union does not have the right paperwork and background checks on the person, even though it knows the person is good for the loan, then it is very difficult to do business with the same people for which the credit union was established to do business. The most significant change has been the rules and operations around lending practices, even for smaller loans.