24 February 2021 The high capital levels of the Irish banks has been praised by commentators, politicians and academics when considering the impact of COVID-19 on the Irish banking sector. It provides stability and reassurance and indicates that what happened in the last financial crisis will not be repeated. However capital requirements that are too high can have negative implications. These have been highlighted in a recent Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) report and by Ulster Bank’s decision to exit the Irish market. The analysis The BPFI report is based on data gathered from the five main Irish banks, the European Central Bank and the European Banking Authority. The research underlying the report covered 12 million data points across 613,000 mortgage accounts worth €83 billion.