Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 September 2025

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Pre-Budget Engagement (Resumed)

2:00 am

Dr. Robert Kelly:

The first one is a very broad question. There has been pretty much an overhaul of what we call the microprudential regulation within the banking system. That is how individual banks are regulated and the buffers they put in place, and the resilience around those. Then there is, and this essentially it came out of the crisis, an overarching set of buffers and rules, like the mortgage measures, which are macroprudential measures. Because each individual institution could as though it was resilient, this was designed to protect the system as a whole in order where there could be a build-up of risk, let us say, to property exposure. I am happy to go into more detail but there is a lot of detail there.

On the banking and financial system, this is multifaceted as well. One of the areas where we have seen a growth is non-bank financing. The reality is that when we think about some of these firms that we may say are going to grow quickly, they may not be the traditional type of firms that have collateral, which a bank finds it easy to price a loan against. They need to be more specialised, need to understand the risk and need to finance that.