Mr. Eamonn Crowley:

I am joined today by my colleague Patrick Farrell, who is the retail banking director at Permanent TSB, and we both look forward to the discussion with the committee.

The exit of two banks from the Irish market is an unprecedented event in the history of Irish banking. I want to assure the committee that we at Permanent TSB fully appreciate the importance of this challenge and the need for us and the wider industry to meet it. At Permanent TSB, we have five key priority areas of focus to ensure we can support customers, colleagues and communities through this seismic change. These priorities are as follows: safely integrating more than €7.6 billion of mortgage home loans, business loans and credit facilities into our business over the coming months; supporting customers in transferring their banking relationship to Permanent TSB in as smooth and straightforward a manner as possible; preserving jobs and welcoming 450 new Ulster Bank colleagues to Permanent TSB later this year; maintaining our support for local communities by enhancing our branch presence in 25 communities throughout the country, increasing our presence in close to 100 locations nationwide; and continuing to serve and support hundreds of thousands of our existing customers and the provision of home loan mortgages and small business finance into the Irish economy.

There is no more important priority for Permanent TSB this year. Over the past 12 months we have deployed hundreds of colleagues across the Bank to ensure we meet these objectives and deliver for our customers, colleagues and communities. When it comes to account switching, in the first four months of 2022 we opened three times as many current accounts as we did in the same period last year. It is clear many Ulster Bank and KBC customers have already decided to switch bank sooner rather than later, and we are delighted we have been in a position to facilitate all those customers who have already chosen Permanent TSB as their new bank.

I want no one to doubt how important this is to us and how seriously we are taking it. We have always been big promoters of switching and competition. That is clear from our success in growing our share of the mortgage market steadily over the past decade. It is clear in the ambition we have displayed in our agreement to acquire €7.6 billion in Ulster Bank residential mortgage and SME assets, and 25 Ulster Bank branches in communities across Ireland, which signals our intent to be an even stronger competitor in the Irish retail and SME banking market in the years to come. It is clear from our success in outperforming the market for attracting current account switchers from banks that have departed in the past, such as Halifax and Danske, where we overindexed by way of attracting customers to Permanent TSB.

Nonetheless, the simultaneous departure of Ulster Bank and KBC represents a switching challenge of a much greater scale. In particular, Ulster’s current account and deposit account base is far more sizeable than those of banks that have left the market in the past. Switching a banking relationship to a new provider also needs to be considered in the context of the individual needs of customers, in addition to the extensive documentation requirements relating to anti-money laundering for both personal and business customers with which banks must comply. The scale of change and personalisation requirements together create complexity. It creates risk and it creates a requirement to scale up our infrastructure to cope with an unprecedented volume of account switchers.

That said, our plans are well under way in this regard. That is why we have hired approximately 350 additional colleagues to the bank since July last year. Over the coming months, we will also be hiring another 400 colleagues to support the job of welcoming all these new customers and getting them what they need: access to our app, new online banking logins, new cards, new PINs and re-establishing all the payment instructions that underpinned salaries going into their accounts and bills and other payments going out. It is why we will run a major customer awareness campaign to make things as easy as possible and let people know what they need to do.

It is why we have reorientated our branches throughout the country, our web channels and our telephone channels to get new customers through our physical and virtual doors and settled in quickly with their new accounts set up. It is why we are putting teams on the ground in the communities of the 25 Ulster Bank branches that we will be acquiring, ensuring that we can support these customers in transferring their accounts to their new local Permanent TSB branch. We are also consistently monitoring customers' feedback to ensure that we can improve the experience. Vulnerable customers are also top of mind for us and it is vital that the departing banks identify their vulnerable customers and work with us to provide the necessary supports required to assist these customer in transferring their accounts. We are enthusiastic about making this significant investment. It is necessary, and it demonstrates how much we want the business of Ulster Bank and KBC Bank customers.

However, leaving aside all the investment we are making, the scale of the challenge means the success of this switching exercise will depend on many more parties than Permanent TSB and the other banks that are represented here today. Account opening is only the first step in the process. It will require the support of the country’s utility providers and other direct debit originators, such as the energy suppliers, the broadband and telephone companies and every business whose customers use direct debits to pay their bills. They will have a huge role to play in quickly and efficiently processing customer requests to change direct debits from their old bank to their new one and cutting out the difficulties that a missed payment would cause for a customer. It will require the support of our regulator, but it will also require the support of policymakers and legislators such as members of the committee. All parties must work together to minimise disruption for customers, removing as much as possible of the customer workload involved and facilitating greater efficiency in transferring millions of payment instructions from the departing banks over to the Irish banks that are going to stick around and support the customers who are leaving those banks.

To reiterate, our priorities are as follows: to safely integrate over €7.6 billion of mortgage home loans, business loans and credit facilities; to support customers in transferring their banking relationship to Permanent TSB; to preserve jobs and welcome 450 new Ulster Bank colleagues to the bank; to maintain our support for local communities by enhancing our branch presence and growing it from a current 75 branches to almost 100 branches; and to continue to serve and support hundreds of thousands of existing customers and the provision of home loan mortgages and small business finance. I assure the committee of our commitment to making the customer journey to Permanent TSB as simple and stress-free as possible. We look forward to continuing to welcome thousands of new customers to a bank with a deep community heritage and customer service ethos. However, without an ecosystem of support, with all parties prepared for this unprecedented challenge, there is a significant risk for customers and for wider society. It is imperative that we all work together to ensure the safe passage of hundreds of thousands of customer loans, accounts and long-standing banking relationships.