Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Access to Finance for SMEs: Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank and AIB

3:00 pm

Mr. Andrew Blair:

With regard to decision making and the options on forbearance solutions for customers, the first point concerns decision making. Customers repeatedly ask where the decision is made. For small businesses, we make it close to the customer. In terms of the range of options, we have all sorts of options that we developed on the mortgage side for the personal customer and this has been rolled out to SMEs. This includes reduced capital payments, term extensions, interest only arrangements and longer-term arrangements where we look at the capacity of the customer to repay and identify that there are certain assets they do not need for the purpose of their business and that they may want or need to sell at that point in time. This will create a lower debt burden and a higher level of viability. If needs be, we will also warehouse debt in the business for the SMEs.