While the Central Bank has set out its sustainability guidelines, nobody, least of all borrowers, would be served by the Central Bank attempting to place a narrow straitjacket preventing innovation around possible solutions within those guidelines.
Banks are beginning to learn from experience the elements that differentiate an ineffective engagement with their arrears customers, from the kind of engagement that leads to an arrangement which is not only sustainable, but is in fact sustained because it matches the borrower’s abilities and motivations. Some banks have gone further successfully down this road than others.