AIB chief says bank is ‘fixed’ and ready to float on stock market

AIB chief executive Bernard Byrne has said the bank has been "fixed" and is ready for a stock market initial public offering (IPO) whenever the Government decides to press the button.

In a speech delivered to the Leinster Society of Chartered Accountants, Mr Byrne said: "The role of the board and the executive for the last five or six years was to fix the bank. This is largely done. It's now realistic for the State . . . to look at getting all of its capital back over a time period. It's our job to position ourselves to be ready for that value to be delivered.

“We have fixed the bank, we’ve done the work, we’ve remediated the issues and we’ve made it more efficient. Our challenge now is to move to the next phase. It’s about being quite different into the future as we face into a different competitor set.”

Partnerships

He added: “We obviously need to be very agile, flexible and nimble. Capable of significant investment in new technologies and new industries. We need to have the capacity to enter material partnerships and joint ventures that we wouldn’t have done in the past. And the flexibility to add new capital to support growth.”

He said that while the timing of an IPO could be affected by events such as Brexit, markets were always resilient.

“We have to position the bank to be ready for when the markets comes back,” he said, adding that AIB was now in “good shape” and “robust”.

Whenever the Government decides to press ahead with an IPO of shares, “we’ll be ready to do that”, Mr Byrne said. “That’s my job and ultimately the board’s job.”

AIB is 99.9 per cent owned by the State, having received a €20.8 billion bailout from taxpayers following the crash in 2008. The Government had hoped to float 25 per cent of AIB on the stock market this year but deferred it until 2017 due to market volatility.