Mr. Ed Sibley:

I will answer the final point made about security and Ms McEvoy might cover secure customer authentication. Personally, I do not feel that I am here to defend the indefensible.

We are grateful for the opportunity to be here. We take our responsibility to be accountable and transparent, in respect of the work we do, incredibly seriously. There are clearly issues in the financial system and it is helpful for us to come to the committee to discuss those issues. I welcome the opportunity to continue to enhance how we engage.

Regarding the specific questions raised, concerning the five retail banks, which I think was the aspect raised, I am not aware of any threat we have made to revoke the licences of those five banks. That could possibly have been before my time, but I have been working in the Central Bank for more than eight years and I am not aware of it. What we have done, and continue to do, as appropriate, from time to time is to apply restrictions on licences for various reasons, for example, if we have concerns regarding the safe operation of an institution, its business model, its financial stability or aspects of how it might be interacting with its customers. We do that from time to time, and beyond banks.

Moving on to loan sales, typically, they are sold on a portfolio basis. They are dealt with in commercial terms and the lenders, typically, decide to not share that information. To my knowledge, those portfolios would not be valued, from a mortgage loan perspective certainly, on an individual loan basis. What I would expect to happen is for a purchaser to do a level of due diligence, which would probably be sample based rather than looking every loan, and then offering a price based on that due diligence, which would also include forecasting of future performance and the like, as well as underlying property values. It is a matter for those purchasers concerned whether they choose to disclose are not. Typically, the prices are overall aggregates.