Mr. Frank Daly:

I think there's probably two elements to that, Senator. There's no doubt that local managers would have been more in touch with what was going on in a particular locality. And, in terms of what we talked earlier in relation to, I suppose, planning and zoning and hope value, local managers I think would probably have been more on top of that. On the other hand, it may be that the amount of discretion allowed to local managers was not consistent, let's say, across the banks or even maybe within some banks. The centralisation of lending certainly probably had the capability to bring a greater discipline to it, and you could expect, in fact, that that's where the greater ... the better analysis of overarching or macro market demand and supply might have been better located.

I suppose the one thing we would say is that, in terms of the documentation that came across to us in relation to the loans, is that I think part of the problem that the banks had in the end was the way in which, in many cases, the actual loan documentation and the detail about the origination of the loans was actually located in the local banks rather than necessarily all centralised in a particular ... one particular IT record or whatever. And that in itself probably created some difficulties for the banks. Again, that's in terms of what we saw in the documentation coming across. So, if you have dispersed lending, if you don't have centralisation of records and if you don't have that sort of centralised oversight, then you do run the risk of not having a full picture of what your lending is.