Mr. Colm Kincaid:

Whatever about the committee, they are certainly not beyond the reach of the Central Bank. We have a very regular engagement with the retail credit firms and credit servicing firms, which are authorised and regulated by the Central Bank. They are subject to all of our authorisation standards and requirements. They are subject to all of our requirements for people in control functions to be approved and authorised by us. We inspect and engage with them. We engage with their CEOs. We have engaged and will engage with their CEOs specifically on the issue of customers who are on higher variable rates and may not have an option to switch where that lender does not provide a full suite of products for those kinds of customers. That is a very live engagement of ours with them.

What we do in our risk-based approach to supervision is zone in on the issues that we are particularly concerned about at a particular point in time. As I said, in 2021 and into 2022, our main focus was on these long-term mortgage arrears cases that had been sitting there for a long time and getting the institutions to make progress on that. I will point out that, statistically, these entities hold three quarters of long-term mortgage arrears but where we have seen progress in mortgage arrears, we have seen it in those entities. We have required them to improve how they have been doing that but we still believe, and we have said this publicly, that there is more for them to do, particularly at this point in time because, as the Chairman said, they have these loans on their books where people may not be able to switch. Having done the analysis of the characteristics of that book, we will now be engaging with them to understand how they have factored all of that into their pricing strategies and into the suite of options they have available for people. That is a very live engagement.