Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 27 March 2018

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

Overview of Operations: Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland

2:00 pm

Mr. Nick Ashmore:

We talked about that point earlier. As we structure the loans, ideally, one would fund loan by loan. They would draw down a loan and then pass it straight to the small and medium enterprise, SME. However, in practical terms, to deal with that we tend to fund in tranches. There are 23,000-odd loans at this stage, we do not have the resources, systems and operations to do that and it would be prohibitively expensive for the on- lender. Those tranches are either drawn in advance and then deployed or they are drawn in arrears after the loans have been deployed, depending on the financial institution or on what works more effectively. However, where they draw the funds in advance, they have a limited period in which to use those funds. We did not give FEXCO Asset Finance €70 million upfront. It draws down from us as it needs the funding in tranches that are manageable, maybe €5 million or €10 million at a time. We pre-agree the schedule of tranches to be drawn down in advance. We make sure they will not be able to sit on large amounts of money but we provide the funding when they call it from us in order for them to be able to run their businesses effectively. There is a very small window of time where funds might sit on a balance sheet but we are generally looking at situations where the funds in some cases may be in a separate vehicle, in which case they would not be used for anything else apart from sitting on deposit.

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