Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 30 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Brian Goggin:

No the ... the sales culture, if that's what ... I think you're referring to, Chairman, was a ... a process embedded in Bank of Ireland. The actual ... the actual programme that we invested in was a programme in the early 1990s that we brought in from the US, and it was, if I remember correctly, the Cohen Brown process. And this was about how you data mine your customer base, how you get a significant higher share of wallet. And in Bank of Ireland, and Bank of Ireland was acknowledged and recognised for this across Europe, we built one of the most successful bank assurance models in European banking and sales integration in that was very, very important. So it was about ... it was about customer relationship managers identifying, in their customer base, prospects that would be suitable for investment products, pension products, etc. etc., and the whole, kind of, objective behind this retail strategy was to ensure that our product penetration, across the more valuable segments of the retail customer base, were significantly increased from where they were, in the face of the kind of competition that was coming at us.