Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 8 March 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Tracker Mortgages: Mr. Padraic Kissane

9:30 am

Mr. Padraic Kissane:

It was the margins but also the retention of the business. If it was moving within four years, the bank was not getting a return on its costs. Many people started in this investigation by talking about Bank of Scotland, which introduced the product, but its first margin was 1.75% or 1.5% above the ECB. We ended up with margins of 0.5% and 0.4%. I even saw a margin of 0.2% above the ECB. It was Danske Bank, I might add. When Danske Bank introduced the loan-to-value tracker product some of the other things that have emerged from the investigation, such as the margin issue in PTSB, resulted from that move. PTSB felt that if it left out a definitive tracker rate, even though there was a tracker rate used, it could lower the margin on the expiry of the fixed rate and counter the option that the broker might move people to Danske Bank and so forth. Interestingly, Danske Bank was not predominantly a broker. It only did a pilot with a number of brokers. It was predominantly a direct bank through National Irish Bank. That is what lay at the door of concern with AIB, Bank of Ireland, PTSB and Ulster Bank, the key banks.

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