Mr. Gabriel Makhlouf:

I just want to be clear on this. One of the interesting things, as I said at the beginning of our discussion, is that the financial system is changing. One of the interesting features that we are seeing, of course, is that increasingly people are not looking for a single service provider for all of their financial services. They seem to be happy, for example, to have a digital service offering from one provider, to have a mortgage with another provider and to have their salary paid into a third provider. We are seeing the nature of financial services change, which means the nature of competition is changing. One of the challenges we all have is to understand exactly what is happening to competition here. The old way of thinking about competition is changing and certainly in recent discussions I had with the chair of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, this precise issue arose. It is my view that at some point the CCPC will have to look at how competition in financial services, and specifically in retail banking, is going and we are ready to help support that work. What we are seeing at the moment is quite a different picture, certainly when it comes to interest rates. I am on record as saying, including at this committee previously, that my preference would be to see a rapid pass through of ECB decisions into the market. In Ireland we saw a slower pass through of increases to mortgage payers but also to depositors.