Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Cyril Roux:

The other part of principle 2 is the resourcing. So I think here we've made some progress as we've increased staffing in banking supervision by moving the approved resources from 110 to 140, and when the Central ... when the IMF came, the number of people in banking supervision was just a little under 100, and now as I said, we're 124. That's a 25% increase. So I think we've, you know, we've closed much of that gap.

The second is supervisory techniques and tools. So here I think the Central ... the IMF, as I mentioned, recognised that we have made a lot of progress. I've mentioned ... I quoted other parts of their internal review that we've made substantive steps, but there were things in that were not ... we're not up to the standards. What are the things that we're not up to the standards? But we're not looking at the returns in the way as thoroughly as the IMF wanted, so we get a lot of returns, but they felt that other supervisors would spend more time in looking at them and challenging them, and I think that's quite different now in the SSM. So I think that's very clear, and we'll see next year it's different. The other thing is they felt is we didn't have enough on-site supervision, so that's closed as well because we ... and third, we didn't spend as much time as we needed on the low impact supervision. Again, I said with 10,000 regulated entities, 9,500 as low impact as PRISM said that we should have only low ... reactive supervision. That's not acceptable for the IMF.