Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Richie Boucher:

Well, I think they were sufficiently challenged at the time, but the challenge ... or some of the decisions were incorrect. It's absolutely clear that some of the lending we did turned out to not to work out well for the customers or for ourselves. The process of exceptions, as I think has been explained in the document and the volume, is often if there was a minor exception across a multiple transaction, the whole exposure to that customer would be included in an exception. What we... so I would go with the thesis that whether or not the lending was done on an exception or whether it was done within policy, some of the lending was mistaken. What we do now is that... we do still have exceptions. We give greater clarity to our board as to why exceptions will be taking place and part of it is that some of policies are quite tight deliberately. Because under an exception process you can, you can't have... say, for some corporate type transactions in particular, it's very hard to have a model that reflects the complexity of corporate transaction and if a policy exception is triggered, then it goes to a different level of decision-making, so it gets a higher level of scrutiny.