Ms Francesca McDonagh:

We have made this a key priority. We have three priorities, one of which is transformation. People often think transformation means IT because it does in business generally. It also means culture, however. We are off to an improved start. I know that because we ask our people and look at other outcomes related to culture. We are on the foothills. While journey is a slightly overused term, there is much further to go than we have come so far.

We articulated our purpose and our four key values. At the end of 2017, we embarked on significant communications activity to increase awareness and understanding of what those purposes and values are among all of our employees. Over 6,000 colleagues have attended 50 roadshows across the country. These were led by managers and leaders who talked about culture and what it means to be customer-focused or accountable.

We have made changes in our customer focus perspective in terms of how we resource our front line. We have made improvements in some of our processes, and there is more to do. We are investing in our technology to be more customer focused in that role. We have also increased two-way communication so it is not just top down but bottom up and across, with informal communication through split level meetings, greater use of technology and just general openness. We have improved recognition of our people. When they exhibit the values that we feel proud of as Bank of Ireland and that a customer would be delighted by, we recognise, encourage and celebrate that. We are investing in developing the skills of our people whether they are leaders or people managers. We are embarking on people manager training and investing to help them understand their values and actions. There is a huge amount of activity.

I chair a group customer board, on which Mr. Gavin Kelly and Mr. Tony McMahon join me, that looks at specific metrics and how this manifests in how the customer feels. Do they feel that the effort of dealing with Bank of Ireland is improving and would they recommend the brand? There are the net promoter scores and we look at verbatims. I have a live feed of verbatims from customers, good and bad, about how they feel. We are very responsive and take them very seriously. We contact many of those customers. We have a meeting tomorrow and we will call customers who have given us some feedback to understand it better. We spend a great deal of time on the front line. I will spend the majority of next week just with front-line colleagues on our customers and clients.

Is the huge amount of activity working? We survey our people regularly. We have seen a significant improvement in staff engagement and cultural embedding since we started to measure this approximately 18 months ago. It is still not where we want it to be. There are areas of great progress around understanding of purpose, values and belief. The behaviours that are expected of people are well understood. Our colleagues' understanding of their risk responsibilities is very high. There is also recognition that there are opportunities to improve our technology and processes, and we are working on those. However, there has been a tangible improvement in what our people are saying about our culture over the past 18 months. That is great, but I want the customers to feel that through improved customer service. We are seeing that but the challenge for ourselves in our ambition is that there is more to do.