Mr. Brian Nugent:

From our perspective, face-to-face is hugely important. We have nearly 250 locations if one counted all of our branches and different brands across the patch so it is hugely important for us that we have those interactions and they work well for our customers. We would do about 34,000 interactions in our branches with customers in terms of branch visits. That is a huge part of our business and it continues to be hugely important to us. We have about 1,500 colleagues working on that across, for instance, the AIB brand in our branches.

Earlier we touched on the call centre. Traditionally, the guts of 600 staff would have operated in our call centres around the start of the Covid period. That would be towards 800 staff and growing to deal with the change in the banking environment, the way customers interact with us now and the fraud levels. The increased regulation with secure customer authentication has meant that we have had to really step that up and we continue to step that up as we go through the cycle. There is the capacity that is needed to run a call centre now to deal with the extra initiatives. For example, the fraud element, of which the Deputy will be aware from dealing with his constituents, is a hugely important interaction for us and for the customers.