Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

3:35 am

Mr. Peter Nyberg:

It is a good question. The reason I hesitate is that all bankers are not good bankers and all non-bankers are not bad. It is more a question of how one approaches risk management. What happened in the run-up to the crisis is that the selling of credit, of money, became more important than handling the risky assets that the banks got. What non-executive directors need to do is to quite often be more challenging to executives than they often are. If they have strong experience, either in finance or somewhere else which is close to finance, then it would be more helpful. It is very individual. It is not really easy to do it through regulation.