Dr. Colin Hunt:

We are in the business of bringing a relationship back. I could sit here all day and talk about all of our various strengths with regard to our capital position, our balance sheets, our profit and loss statement and so on. The big strength of our institution is that we have 2.8 million customers. We are not in the business of transactions. We are in the business of relationships because they are core to the way we view ourselves and the way we view our importance in the country. The lesson for us arising from this matter is that we cannot get too far ahead of our customers. We cannot damage that relationship by getting too far ahead of them too quickly. That is the big lesson from the experience of those few days in July. A huge amount of work over many months went into preparing for this. We worked hard with An Post on an agreement to increase significantly the range of services that we offer through its offices around the country. We have 170 branches. An Post has 920 post offices and we were transforming the volume of services that we were planning to offer through them. No shortage of analysis went into this. No shortage of data were considered when we were building this proposal. When it was launched, however, it became abundantly clear extraordinarily quickly that the customers did not want this. Once that became clear, we set about reversing our position. It took three days to go through governance, which accounts for the delay between the decision being announced and it being reversed. However, we corrected the mistake as quickly as we could. I reiterate that I deeply regret that the proposal was made in the first place.