Mr. Pat Kilbane:

We are also promoting Microfinance Ireland as a direct lender. While our efforts in concert with the county enterprise boards and local enterprise offices have been quite successful, we realise that our business must adopt a strategy that allows us to operate via more than one channel. We are already complementing our engagement with the CEBs with more direct engagement efforts. In fact, almost 40% of our applications are coming in directly to us.

As part of this strategy, we have revamped our website to make it more of a resource centre for loan applicants. We have, for example, added a great deal of online help to assist clients in preparing applications. An enormous amount of work has been done in that space. We are conscious, at the same time, that even with those two strands working better, we still need additional avenues to support job creation. That is where the other initiatives come in. Clearly, with eight people driving that amount of change, it is a considerable stretch. In fact, it is fair to say that it will be very tough and stretching on the business to achieve the volume of work we need to achieve.