Ms Jean Carberry:

It is the second one. Work has commenced, and there will be ongoing capacity building in MFI. A key enabler is a modernisation of its system. It was sharing a system with Social Finance Foundation, which was rather antiquated. There was a lot of manual processing of loans, which was very inefficient. One of the conditions that we imposed when we put earlier rounds of funding in was that it modernise this system.

What we experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic was a huge spike in demand for the MFI product, and it could not cope with that demand, so what we have been doing in the last couple of years is building up capacity and modernising its systems. The other thing that we want to do is to much more closely link it in to our other engines, namely, Enterprise Ireland and the local enterprise office, LEO network, so that we can get much better synergy. What we see is that Microfinance Ireland should really be the financing arm of the LEO network and Enterprise Ireland. We cannot call it a bank because it is not regulated. By bringing it into the family of the Department, we will be better placed to nurture those networks. It will be a slow burn.