Ms Elizabeth Arnett:

Let me address that. An active current account could have 70 or more transactions in a month. If we think of all the times people use their current accounts to tap for a coffee, pay a mortgage or whatever, an active current account on which they are fully reliant will have a high number of transactions. If a person's number of transactions is between one and five, it is not unreasonable to assume, primarily because customers as well as independent research are telling us, it is very unlikely to be that person’s main bank account. What defines reliance here, for example, would be where a person has a bank account elsewhere. That person would be less reliant on Ulster Bank. If a person has payments, salaries or a Department of Social Protection payment going into that account, that person is more reliant. Let us face it, unless there is something going in, it is very hard to make payments out. If payments are not going into that account and into another one, again reliance is even less. If the balance is extremely low, a person will not pay the ESB or electricity bill out of that. Again, the reliance is even less in that case. However, we accept there is a qualified judgment on our part in relation to those numbers of transactions, which is why we have the additional step of being able to reverse the freeze within 15 minutes if the customer states they are still reliant. However, at that point we have the conversation with the customers as to how much support and time they need and whether we can get them an appointment in the other banks. We invite them into our branch where we have Bank of Ireland, AIB and Permanent TSB in the banking hall and ask whether we can get it done for them. That is a very important step to get attention for customers who, bear in mind, have had six months’ notice and any number of contacts. Rather than jump straight to closing the account completely, irrespective of the numbers, we have introduced this step.

We have done two things for customers who are reliant on their account and have two sources of data on that. We have been talking to those customers and they are telling us they are banked elsewhere. We have also researched separately to verify that fact. We know that 80% of the customers who are heavily banked have a bank account elsewhere. We know 96% of them know their account will be closed and 91% are telling us they will take action within the next four weeks. What we have seen over the past two weeks in terms of the changes on the numbers of accounts that are opened and closed, that are not reliant, that have no balance, or that are heavily reliant actually bears that out. We want to avoid a situation where we are closing accounts where customers are reliant on them. However, we have told customers that if they leave the account, we will close it for them. We have said that we would do that and we need to finish that process for customers. However, the objective is to make sure there is no reliance on the account. If there is reliance, we can reverse that very quickly and engage with the customer. We need to keep the momentum going in terms the overall journeys for customers.