Mr. Bernard Byrne:

If we go back to the starting conversation with Deputy McGrath, we talked about how the decision that was made clearly did not think of the consequences. Certainly in terms of processes and procedures that exist at this stage, all products and all product decisions think forward and backwards in terms of the impact and the obligations. We have a full understanding of the obligations that sit in every product and every contract and we have done a lot of work to make sure we understand those, which was not the case historically.

We have had a complete change in terms of the leadership, the board and senior management teams across the organisation. This is to give us a fresh perspective on where we are. We have introduced quite a diverse leadership team in terms of banking and non-banking positions to make sure we have a different perspective.

We have a performance management system across the organisation that in respect of the assessment of individual performance assesses 50% on what someone does and 50% on how they go about doing it so how people do their job, and that includes interactions with customers, is just as important as what they actually get done. Historically, effectively, 100% of assessment would have been on the what side. We have a net promoter score system that allows us 30,000 individual customer contacts every quarter to understand the customer's perspective in respect of each of our product offerings and each of our customer journeys and we rank, rate and track those. In respect of complaints, which historically would not have been analysed as forensically, we have a complaints team that effectively analyses them and looks for root causes.

Even small modest numbers of complaints would be picked up now and we would understand what the underlying causes were in respect of those.

Staff engagement is very important. We have spent a significant amount of time working with our own staff to understand what they feel about the organisation. We carried out our first assessment in respect of that in 2013. Obviously morale was very low at that time and the position was very difficult. The bank was ranked very low at the fifth percentile in terms of comparable organisations in a worldwide survey. When we last completed the survey in November, we had reached the 62nd percentile, which is quite good and shows we are moving in the right direction, with engaged staff, interest in the customer and having adopted a number of pillars across the organisation.

I ask my colleague, Mr. Mulhall, to answer the Senator's question on the customer perspective in terms of bank branches.