Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Cyril Roux:

Certainly. So I think the staff working on banking ... well, you have the staff in banking supervision that I alluded to in my opening remarks, so with the three divisions that we have there ... so I think we've calculated the number of people we need. There's a benchmarking exercise done at the ECB. So we are towards the lower end in terms of number of people but ... so that will be revisited by the ECB benchmarking all national supervisory authorities. Then you have the staff in enforcement and the staff in policy - banking policy - and developing the regulations. So ... the issues are not exactly the same for the three blocks. So I would say for prudential supervision, we have some vacancies. We have 124 people when we have our approved complement ... or we have estimated we need 140. But I think, here, where we are an outlier is mostly in terms of supervisory experience. There's a lot of people coming and going and this is very different, for instance, from what I've experienced in France where you have on-site inspectors that stay for 15, 20, 25 years. So when you compare the lengths of experience of our staff ... although they're remarkable staff, but they're gaining experience ... they just have fewer years of experience than their counterparts.