Ms MaryRose McGovern:

As the ombudsman mentioned there, for 28% of complaints that we received in 2022 there was an element of customer service. That was really disappointing, because the overall statistic for 2021 was 23%, so that was an increase. However, it is worth bearing in mind that our results are always a little bit behind when the event happened. I am very mindful of the work the Central Bank of Ireland has been doing. It conducted a review of customer support telephone lines. In February 2022, when it published the results, they were really very disappointing. There were wait times of up to two hours for customers trying to get through on the phone, and very significant attrition rates, where people were just simply unwilling to wait any longer. The Central Bank published an update on that work earlier this year, however, and the net result of that was that better results were being shown. That shows that when you put the resources into servicing the needs of your customers, it can give rise to good outcomes. With my fingers crossed, I am hopeful that perhaps the percentage of complaints with a customer service element to them that we will see will drop. The resourcing piece to ensure that customers of financial service providers are adequately supported is particularly important with two significantly-sized players leaving the market in Ireland and a number of those customers transferring to existing players in the market, as it were. What we would like to see is that those new customers who have transferred, like the existing customers, will continue to be supported at an adequate level.