Mr. Kevin Johnson:

We all share the frustration at the lack of pace. The work the group did, particularly on the high priority area of lending, has resulted in the consultation paper from the Central Bank. While we did move away from the CUAC recommendation of a two-tier system to having the tiering captured in each of the regulations, we were very much at one in our concern on the restriction of our activities. Some principles were set out such as, for example, that no credit union should be restricted from services or limits they currently provide. However, the consultation paper that was issued on lending actually does row back and restrict some of the activities we currently provide, so we do have concerns. Similarly, we do not see reflected the proposal for the automatic inclusion in a higher tier for credit unions of a certain size and risk profile. As Mr. Corr said, the recommendations from this group on the tiered regulations, to be fair to the Central Bank, came in after it had published its consultation paper on lending. If we see the feedback statement and the proposed regulations on lending reflecting the very positive move regarding the asset bases and reflecting the principles of tiering that are recommended, then we will have made significant progress.

To address the Chairman's comments on the digital side, this is something we have got on with ourselves and quite a bit of work has been done from the perspective of realising that perhaps we were not reaching out to a segment of members by not using these channels. We now have a situation where a number of credit unions have in excess of 20% of all their lending coming through digital channels. We are making good progress, just to reassure the committee.