Mark Duffy (banker)

Mark Duffy is an Irish banker.

In 1981 he joined ICC Bank as a graduate trainee before taking up a position at 3i, a venture capital company. When 3i was sold to Anglo Irish Bank in 1987 he was offered a role with the new owner. He joined the banks executive committee aged 30 in 1991.^[1] He was approached by Bank of Scotland, who owned part of 3i at the time, to become CEO aged 31 to rescue their ailing Equity bank in 1992. He successfully grew this entity, acquiring his previous employer ICC along the way, into a €37bn full service bank successfully challenging the Irish banks for the first time.^[1] He prompted a competitions enquiry of the sector to gain entry, introducing new products such as "tracker mortgages" and marketing techniques to position the bank as the first genuine large scale challenger. During this time he grew the bank strongly, some say too strongly.

After 17 years as CEO he resigned from the Bank of Scotland (Ireland) in 2008 at the age of 51 but remained on until 2009 to steer the bank through the Irish banking crisis at the time. He was replaced by his former COO Joe Higgins who along with other colleagues established the very successful Certus. He moved abroad, established a private not for profit investment vehicle backed by his Swedish's wife's family with European wide interests in property, hospitality and financial services the proceeds of which have driven a family charitable trust aimed at rehabilitating drug use. His wife is one of the Aastrup family and it is believed she manages her family interests from Mallorca.

Whilst outspoken Duffy was only one of two Irish banking CEO's at the time not called before any of the Irish banking enquiries. He came out publicly in 2015, to criticise the UK HBOS inquiry as a grossly unfair and politicised process which he maintained failed to interview people and generally attempt to arrive at a fair conclusions. The UK inquiry never responded.

He has been associated with a range of new start up vehicles, particularity Svenska Fonden and LoanBox, which appears to be a non-bank lending platform with offices in Dublin, Lisbon and Madrid. Our own Zug, Switzerland appears to be his family base. He was also rumoured in June 2018 to be "eyeing up an the Irish residential lending market" so maybe a repeat of what he did with BoSI is in store. [6] [Ex-BoSI chief eyes return to mortgage lending - Independent.ie]

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