Billy Kane sounds like the name of a Wild West shootist and troubleshooting is certainly the stock in trade of Irish Permanent's general manager of retail banking.
With a background that includes management accountancy, sales and senior management, he has brought a retail culture to Irish Permanent since its flotation in 1994. And now he sees the distinction between banking and retailing blur further as supermarket giant Sainsbury leads the the way in introducing banking services in Britain. He says that the future in retail banking will not be fought through branch networks but in supermarkets and shopping centres "where we need to be". His agreement with Dunnes Stores, offering finance packages through its 700,000 ClubCard members, and similar ventures with Telecom Eireann and Northern Ireland Electricity, are evidence of new ways of reaching potential customers.
From Bray, Co Wicklow, Mr Kane has followed a circuitous route to his present position from a time when it was still fashionable to seek a job for life. With his brother, he ran a sweet shop in Bray at the age of 16 and paid bus drivers £5 to drop kids off in front of their premises to buy sticks of rock, souvenirs and the toffee apples. "Great margins in that business, huge margins," he laughs.
With 21 per cent of the mortgage market, Irish Permanent announced healthy pre-tax profits of £31.3 million on Tuesday for the year's first half, reflecting a buoyant housing and car finance market and Mr Kane sees no indication of a downturn despite global rumblings and the dangers of an overheated mortgage market. He is also confident of increasing market share.
"While I think we would appear to be defying gravity at the moment, the demographic details on the country suggest that the housing demand will continue. We have already seen that the Bacon initiative has had very beneficial effects," he says.
The danger of the housing market "if any", he adds, was property investors borrowing up to 90 per cent of the value of the property in the residential investment market "on the basis that they could rent the house".
He can now point to a reduction in the provision of mortgages for residential investment property, from 19 per cent of Irish Permanent mortgages in July 1997 to four per cent last month. "It is also interesting that our approvals are still greatly ahead of last year. In terms of funding we were up 40 per cent, but in terms of approvals, that went up a staggering 128 per cent," he says. He says there is no evidence of over-borrowing "within our own lending". He notes that the mortgage formula of 2 1/2 times salary plus one (for a married couple) was designed for families who would, with the arrival of children, revert to being single income, rather than today's increasingly common double-income couple. Meanwhile parents have rowed in behind their children to bridge equity gaps in a highly-priced housing market. He welcomes the increase in the availability of apartment accommodation and the urban renewal it has sparked off, but questions whether the properties will maintain their value and appearance in years to come after "wear and tear and traffic" take their toll. "We ourselves stayed out of a lot of that inner-city development . . . I just wonder myself if there will be a long-term market for one-bedroom apartments without the tax breaks," he adds. As the youngest of a family of four, he was lucky, he says, that the family could afford to send him to UCD where he did a commerce degree. His father, who worked for Burmah Oil, was a well-known trade union official while his mother was "a huge driving force behind the family".
He values his family's strong work ethic, saying it encouraged him to get jobs as a teenager in preference to "gardening, painting or decorating". "At 13 I pushed a bread bike around Bray, delivering bread. We all worked. It was natural for us," he says.
After college he got a job in Coventry as a finance analyst with British Leyland, where he could see the car manufacturer's problems at first hand.
"I suppose what I learnt there was that there had to be balance in life between management and staff. Unfortunately at British Leyland in those days, the union ran the plant."
He returned to Dublin after two years for a valued stint as a sales rep for Rank Xerox going from "office to office" selling photocopiers. "My family was shocked that having graduated and gone to work as a management accountant that I went back selling."
He says he was attracted by "the feel of the company". "They were exciting people to talk to . . . It is probably still the most professional selling training course in the world," he adds.
He never lost the sales, staff "incentivising" and territory managing skills, he says, but he left the company to join with two ex-managers who set up their own rival firm, Sharp Text. "There was a healthy competition when we met them in the sales environment," he says. Valuable contacts were built up in the business community and when the Woodchester financing company was formed, he joined as sales director and the seventh employee, leasing office equipment and later cars. As the company developed he moved to Britain as managing director between 1989 and 1992. Mr Kane describes his British experience positively, saying he was working with ordinary people who were nouveau riche, rather than establishment figures. But he returned to Dublin after four years out of a feeling of homesickness and a because he could not "see a great deal of further expansion within Woodchester". He played a key role in establishing Irish Permanent Finance before taking up his retailing manager position in 1995. He holds the Irish Permanent staff in high regard, saying that their origins in a mutual building society means that they have a customer orientation not found in other institutions.
As a salesman rather than a banker, he describes the difficulty of selling money or - as he puts it - differentiating a tenner. If a lending house has a successful financial product "anyone can copy it within 10 minutes".
"I realised then what we have going for us is staff," he says, citing an 83 per cent satisfaction rating for staff friendliness.
He says that 140,000 of the former mutual's members have continued as shareholders, whose minimum stake "in a fairly bombed-out market" is worth £2,500, while Abbey National's strategic hold on the company has been diluted by further share issues to an 8.6 per cent stake.
Irish Permanent, while increasing its product range, has kept its charge structure simple and it has remained untouched by the whiff of financial scandals which have affected some in the financial services industry.
"To say that it could not happen here would be false because it could happen anywhere. But the organisation is small enough and the management team is, like this organisation, big enough to play and small enough to turn on sixpence," he says.
