Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 26 September 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Banking Sector in Ireland (Resumed): Allied Irish Banks

4:00 pm

Mr. Bernard Byrne:

I will not comment on individual advisers but I will cover the overall commentary. We have an obligation to get down to the European norm under ECB supervision. I covered that in a broad introduction earlier. We have 1,500 people still in our financial solutions group working on case-by-case restructuring of cases and the predominant recovery options tend to come from case-by-case restructuring. We are eight years into this position at this point and we strongly encourage all customers to ensure they actively engage. If customers engage and we can find any solution, we will. The last portfolio we mentioned, the buy-to-let portfolio, had 80% of customers not engaging for 720 days.

What we tend to find is that non-engagement has been one of the key features for a while. We will end up with portfolios moving into a disposable position. That is one point. We cannot allow and will not be let allow a position where these things drift on forever, so we must address them. I do not know whether Mr. O'Keeffe has any extra points to make in respect of that.