Mr. Oisin O'Shaughnessy:

It is the dual system where there is bonus on one side and tax relief on the other, and the tax bands start to become relevant. The bonus under the auto-enrolment, AE, system is more valuable than the 20% tax relief but less valuable than the 40%. There will be an interaction where we will have customers and members of the population who, at different points in their career for different reasons, should be in one or the other. The way the system is currently proposed, that complexity will have to be managed within the market and by providers who will want their customers to be in the best system for them at a particular time.

As Mr. Bolger said, the fact the tax treatment is different means that amalgamation, the inability to consolidate between the AE pot and the occupational pot they might have built up later in their career, is a key concern. Pensions are already complex and consolidation is something people need to do in any event in the current system where they might have moved jobs and have different pensions. Private providers already handle this consolidation issue, and not everyone does it until they retire, but we do plenty of it in our day-to-day business where people bring a prior pension arrangement into their new pension arrangement with Irish Life. It is possible to do and people sometimes long-finger it, but this system introduces a barrier to that consolidation because of the differing tax treatments between the bonus model and the tax relief model.