20 Years Since the Celtic Tiger: Why the Irish Banking System is Still Broken

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1:29David McWilliams: You asked for more geopolitics, more geoeconomics, more housing, sharper chairs and bigger names. So we've listened and we went for it. And I think this is the best programme we've ever put together. We've got the entire Planet Money crew coming over for three separate shows from the US, including a live one in St. Canis's Cathedral. We have Currie Doctorow on Unshittification. Rory Sutherland doing his thing. Mariana Matsukuto. We have a serious session on the end of the dollar, whether AI is going to break the middle classes. We have Ronal lines on actually solving the housing crisis, plus comedy, music, and everything in between.

2:09David McWilliams: That's Kilkenomics, the 6th to the 8th of November in Kilkenny. So, what are you waiting for? Get on the crew list. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It is time, of course, for the podcast. It is late, late August. John went at great expense to himself and his mates to Asturias, to the city of Gijón, which we would pronounce Gijón, but it is Gijón. I only know this because I used to teach English to Spanish kids in Presbray, John, of all places. Ah, yes. A hundred years ago. And they were from Gijon. But anyway, John, the intrepid traveller, got out his compass, got out his special glasses.

3:06David McWilliams: I did. And he went to Asturias in Spain to see the eclipse. How was it, John? Well, Mac, let me tell you. As you know, I've been talking about this for months, literally months. I know. I invested in everything, the glasses, the whole time. Sorry, listeners. I can't stop myself pissing myself here. So we went, me, Al, Ali and Joe went off and we arrived in Asturias, landed on, she's the evening. And the sun was this big orange ball, you know, the evening sun. Beautiful, beautiful. And it was gorgeous and I was so excited, so excited. So we went off and we tore the arse out of it that night. Got up the next morning and it was completely overcast.

3:50And we're going, oh my God, what are we going to do? And we were debating, should we drive the two or three hours to find a spot, a clear spot to see the eclipse itself? So we were checking the internet and we heard that the roads were jammed because everyone was trying to find their spot, a clear spot. But then it started to clear up around lunchtime. So we went grand. We went off and up to the headland in Guillaume. We found our spot and we brought a picnic and we cracked open our wine and our beer and the whole lot. and we were in grey form. Then, at about four o 'clock, as the early crowds were gathering, the clouds started gathering too.

4:30I just started to laugh here. It started to rain, that little speedy rain.

4:36David McWilliams: And all the clouds were coming in really dark. The whole of Europe is under a heat dome as we speak, Sean. I have a weather satellite image of Europe. And all of Europe, as you say, perfect blue skies. and there's this massive blob of 3D thick cloud just all along the Asturian coasts. So you saw nothing? I saw nothing. But at that stage, we had, you know, we had a bottle of wine or two into us and beer and all sorts of other stuff. And the thing is that at that stage, we couldn't drive anywhere. So we stood there. Now, the cloud was so thick, we didn't even know where the sun was. I love it. And people were slagging the arse off us.

5:20I was getting texts from home. But then at, you know, half eight local time, it went dark. So we had no idea of the build-up to it, but we had totality. So it did go dark. So you did get that sensation of the sun disappearing. Exactly. We just didn't know where the sun was. So you didn't have the funny little glasses looking up like everybody else. Well, actually, for to rub salt into the wounds, I got an email from Amazon the next day going, did your order meet expectations? Looking for feedback. I didn't even take them out of the packet. I love it. I love it. My order met expectations, but the sun didn't play ball.

6:03We were the only people in Europe who didn't see. That's really funny. And we were probably some of the only people who made the effort to go there. Completely. because I know that this was earmarked as the place in the whole of Europe to see the eclipse, to see the total eclipse of the sun. Oh well, Johnny boy. Oh man. By the way, listeners, I could tell you stories and maybe I will over time about John's many catastrophes and many great tensions. Well, this is right up there, let me tell you. Which crashed into the reality of, it's life, Johnny boy, it's life. Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, look, I'll tell you what we're going to do.

6:43We're going to talk today about an auspicious date. And the auspicious date is, as Paul McCartney and John Lennon sang, it was 20 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper got the band to play. But it was also 20 years ago today, John, that the Celtic Tiger died. Do you remember the Celtic Tiger? If you don't remember the Celtic Tiger, where it's like the eclipse passed you by in Johnny's case, okay? But the Celtic target... Well, actually, Mac, I will actually say that it was also 20 years ago this month that myself, Sheena and the girls came back from London to live in Dublin. I told you he's jinxed.

7:31I told you, dear listener, the man is jinxed. Do not listen. Do not do a thing this man does. doesn't it doesn't it show you just how little john gives a damn about my opinion that his best mate had spent the last the previous four years five years it's gonna crash it's gonna crash it's all gonna be over and she was a crash smash whatever so think about the weight that he actually puts in my opinion yeah so when i was saying don't come home stay in the uk this place is a basket case it's going to all crash property prices are going to collapse john says fuck off macker i'm going ahead and buying a gaff anyway what would you know about anything yeah you've been spoofing all your life anyway so the reason i want to talk about this john is not to remind you of one of maybe after your asturias decision to go and see the eclipse maybe one of your better ones to come home to Ireland.

8:35One of the finest financial decisions. No, what I want to talk about today is the legacy of the Celtic Tiger through the prism of the fact that the Irish, so the Celtic Tiger, very, very briefly, you know, we know what happened, right? It was a credit housing

8:52David McWilliams: construction boom driven by property interests, banking interests, and a government that not only looked the other way, but inflated the entire thing. Why? Because they were making tax revenue. The whole thing hit the buffers. But the reason I say 20 years ago today, John, is we're talking August 2006. Now, most people look to 2008 as the day or the period when the Celtic Tire crashed. But like all these things, it crashed before. I'm going to explain all of this to you, and I'm also going to explain the legacy of what happened. Now, the legacy is, John, and this is a crucial, crucial fact. The Irish banking system never recovered, number one.

9:37David McWilliams: And number two, the Irish banking system is now not lending anywhere near enough to the Irish private sector. And number three, that means that the Irish private sector is financing most of its expansion to the extent that it is expanding from its own balance sheet. Or it's taking foreigners' money. All of that together makes the economy weaker, not stronger, more fragile, but more importantly, more lopsided towards fiscal policy. All of which I will explain to you in two minutes, okay? But I just want to start the podcast by a little note. In the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about the American economy and the interest rate on long-term American bonds.

10:22David McWilliams: We spoke last week about how Besant, Scott Besant, when he was trying to reduce the yen's value, used euros, didn't want to sell American treasuries or encourage the Japanese. Why? Because the Americans have so much debt. The bond market is just gradually but progressively weakening in America. in the last two days, bond yields have gone up to 5.3%, which in the United States is the highest bond yields in generations. And of course, this is the market beginning the process of reassessing the feasibility or the credibility of American policy at a time when there is all sorts of other things happening in the global financial system.

11:16David McWilliams: So I just wanted to mark that. Just keep your eye on it. If you're in the financial game, keep your eye on the gradual, quiet, but dramatic increase in American long term interest rates, which are a function of the overall credibility of the American policy mix, fiscal and monetary. That is all I'm saying to you. So let's talk about the podcast today. OK, so 2008 was the year that it all fell apart, you know, and it was thought that it was stemmed from America and the bad loans of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or whoever the hell they were. Yeah. Those institutions. But you're saying that the seeds of destruction, as it were, start in 2006.

12:04What sparked that in Ireland in particular?

12:07David McWilliams: So I'll explain to you, right? The Irish credit housing boom, property boom, was entirely homemade. It was made in Ireland, right? And 20 years ago this month, the Celtic tiger began to die. Now, it wasn't until, as we've said, August, September 2008, that the full depth and the kind of horror of the crisis became apparent with a run on the Irish banks. But the damage had been done not just two years previously, but many years previously. In fact, John Stuart Mill, the great English thinker, theologian and economist, said, the crash does not necessarily expose the problem. It merely reveals bad decisions taken in the previous years.

12:52David McWilliams: And that was a quote from the 1860s, John. And the same thing applied, right? So this is how bankruptcies happen. They happen at very first very slowly and then very quickly. But the key point is that August 2006 was the first month that house prices failed to rise in Ireland in about 10 years. Now, once that occurred, it was all over, even though most people, particularly Irish bankers, didn't seem to have a notion what was going on. Why? What's the significance of that? So I'll explain to you, right? In a highly leveraged financial system like Ireland in 2006, and, to a degree, the United States now, right, where everything is cross-collateralised, where everybody lent and borrowed against property, that machine, that financial machine, doesn't run on the level of prices.

13:40David McWilliams: It runs on the change in prices and, more accurately, the change in that change. Ooh, need to explain that, yeah. It's almost the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those. But it's the velocity of change that affects the whole system. And I'll explain that all to you, right? So when banks are falling over themselves to lend in order for them to make money, they come up with what's called teaser products. These teaser products are designed to coax in borrowers with artificially low interest rates on the kind of understanding that those rates will go up or might go up in the future.

14:15David McWilliams: But the assumption is that the entire edifice will keep going. So higher house prices in the future will make it easier to refinance those loans even if the rate of interest goes up. So the entire game is what they call a refinancing game. Now, the most notorious of all these teasers was the tracker mortgage, which I would say was the single biggest destroyer of Irish wealth ever conceived. I don't know what a tracker mortgage is. Exactly, exactly. As the ad went. That was the ad, okay. So the problem is the tracker mortgage basically said to people, look, there's historically low interest rates now.

14:49David McWilliams: The ECB rates are really, really low. we are going to give you a mortgage product that is going to lock in these incredibly low rates, right? And you might have to pay a little bit more in the future, but look, you're going to actually save a fortune here. So let's say, for example, the average interest rate at the time was 3%, the bank rate, but the actual central bank rate was 1%. So the bank said, look, don't worry, we're going to give you the 1%. We won't make any profit, but what we'll do is in the future, maybe in five years or six years time, we will readjust that rate upwards, we'll get our money back, and don't worry, we'll finance you or we'll refinance you.

15:27David McWilliams: Why? Because your house price will have gone up by 50 grand by then, and everything will look hunky-dory. So that was the idea, right? Now, similar sort of teaser loans were used at sort of every tier of the pyramid, the financial pyramid here, right? For developers, for builders, all that sort of state of developers, don't worry, you come in, we'll give you really low estate loans now, and you'll have to pay us a wee bit in the future, OK, so banks lent to developers, to builders, but also to homeowners and commercial office buyers via these various trackers, structured loans, products, these teasers.

16:00David McWilliams: Right. So once a financial structure becomes like that, and that's the basic banking model, the entire edifice is not designed to be repaid, but it's designed to be refinanced. right? So this is the idea of kicking the can down the road. We'll just refinance, we keep going, there'll be money aplenty not to worry, right? Now, what the crucial aspect there for refinancing is that prices continue to rise. So for the developer, they could borrow millions at low interest rates to buy already inflated prices of sites. So that's the developer. The builder would borrow heavily or to finance the construction costs and the homeowners would be coaxed in by tracker mortgage.

16:44David McWilliams: So that was the game, right? And the understanding of everybody, both the banks and the borrowers, was that these loans would never actually be paid off, but they'd be refinanced as house prices rose, meaning that there'd be more what they call equity wealth on the house or the site of the commercial building in the future. And as property prices rose, there'd be more kind of room to refinance. That was the game. But the flaw, let's say the ticking bomb, John, in that, that sort of model is that it doesn't just need property prices to be high. It demands that the pace of acceleration keeps rising to keep everything refinancing.

17:23David McWilliams: So it wasn't the falling prices that upset the game. It was when it became apparent that prices weren't rising fast enough. And that moment happened in August 2006. Because when the pace of rising price started to decelerate, the bomb detonated. Because you couldn't refinance, because refinancing is based entirely on the idea that you will have more and more equity, i.e. wealth in the asset, and that will allow you to refinance. And of course, once prices started, not just to fall, but when they stopped rising, this put the heebie-jeebies into everybody. But that was bound to happen though, wasn't it?

18:14I mean, because things can't keep rising forever.

18:17David McWilliams: Man, I told you that and you still came home. Okay, right, okay, Jesus. No, because we're humans, John, and we think it's not going to happen to me and, you know, that thing happened in the past and look, you know, all that stuff. We convince ourselves that these bad things happen to other people. So then why did prices stop rising? Why then? Nobody knows. There's no trigger. It just, as you said, as you said, any understanding of basic statistics and dynamics and linear dynamics knows, as you said, that things just don't go on forever. They just don't. right now why that happens is anyone's business you can get any sort of ex post reality you say oh that was when the american turned up interest rates or that's when there was a tax cut or la la you can do all those after the event analysis but the basic statistical fact is what's called the second derivative so this is not the change in prices but it's the change in that change so So if prices are going up, right, by, for example, 10%, and the next year they go up by 11%, and then they go up by 12%, there's a constant, constant increase in borrowing because there's a constant, constant assumption that you'll be able to refinance in the future.

19:42Yeah.

19:42David McWilliams: When they go from a 12 % change to a 5 % change, prices are still rising, John. Right, yes. But they're not rising as quickly. So it's not the level of prices. It's actually the first derivative and the second derivative in statistics. And that's what happened in August 2006. As to why it happened, plenty of, what I love is plenty of after the event books have been written about people who didn't say this. Well, this was happening because of this, right? Nobody knows. It's just, and it's the same thing with AI now. Why are people beginning to question AI? Is there any real trigger? Did anything change between last week and the week before?

20:24Yeah.

20:24David McWilliams: No, it's just the nature of time series, actually, in effect. Yeah, the giddiness stops. The giddiness stops, but also it's like, you know, why does a rocket eventually fall to Earth? Why does it eventually decelerate? Because the momentum behind it, which was enormous at the beginning, just falls away. Economic gravity. Exactly, John, exactly. So that is where we were 20 years ago. Okay, so Mac, that's 20 long years ago, it feels. I've read a family in that time. Yes, you have. But what's the hangover of that now? What's the legacy of all of that? It's almost like a trauma, John, right? Because back then the weakness in the system was, as we've said, too much lending.

21:12David McWilliams: Today, the weakness in the Irish system is too little bank lending. The banking system is not functioning. It's not recycling credit. In fact, the opposite is true. Irish deposits are getting stuck in the banking system and it's become a large safe deposit box where in effect, if you can imagine this image, the Irish banking system is where Irish money goes to die. Right, okay. Bank credit to construction in Ireland, I'm not saying it was good at the time or it was right or whatever, fell from a 2008 peak of£10 billion to a trough of roughly 700 million, right? And it's barely recovered since.

21:56David McWilliams: Bank credit to the construction industry in Ireland is down by 88 % in nominal terms since 2006, 2007, 2008. And in real terms, it's worse because construction inflation has been quite dramatic. Now, what is that? Is that the supply side or the demand side? Right. It's both, but it's largely the supply side, right? The role of a bank is to lend money, taking deposits, lend out money, right? They are not lending out money. But if you look at the other aggregates, broader business lending fell by 55 % from 2008, and it's flatlined for almost a decade. And that is, despite the recent boom in the economy, despite the pandemic, despite a complete ECB easing cycle where interest rates have gone from 4 % to zero, back to two, back to four, back to two again.

22:53David McWilliams: We've had a huge cycle. So this isn't some sort of slow post-crisis recovery. This is Irish private money dying. Now, the ramifications of this are enormous for the economy because while Irish bank financing is retreating, So domestic banks have never been more flush. They've never had more money, but they're not lending. So something has had to fill that gap. And what fills that gap is cash flow. So businesses paying for expansion out of their own cash flow, retained earnings, i.e. their profits, or outside equity money coming from outside, right? Foreign investors supplied between 72 % and 78 % of all Irish property and development finance all through the 2010s.

23:40Right. But more interestingly, and this is a quiet and really incipient

23:47David McWilliams: and unbelievably deleterious aspect of the Irish economy, the state has become the lender of last resort to the Irish property markets via the various public sector bodies with their silly acronyms providing funding to the construction sector. So you've got the Irish Strategic Investment Funds, 150 million home builder fund. You have home building Ireland finance, HBFIs, 3.78 billion in loan approvals. You have the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland, the SBCI, just in case you want to know, another silly acronym, lending out 4 billion since 2014. You have the LDA, the Land Development Authority, lending out 1.35 billion.

24:33David McWilliams: And that is drawn from the NTMA. Oh, man. So you have the ISIF, the HBFI, the SBCI, the LDA and the NTMA, right? And whatever you're having yourself. I feel like I need to go to the doctor to get some cream for all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need cream for particularly the NTMAs. Oh, they're terrible. You can't get rid of them. But my point is that all these are state-financed banks and credit institutions that are lending to the construction sector rather than, John, the banking system. Right. And why is that? So the credit crunch, which should come from the banks not lending, isn't coming. Why?

25:17David McWilliams: Because the state is replacing the banks in the construction industry. Now, of course, how are they doing that? They're doing that with their spigot of American money, John. Right. So what we're looking at is the state takeover of the construction industry. that this is, and I don't want to be too dramatic, but this is what socialism looks like. And it's happening here under a centre-right coalition, which is hilarious, right? But have we not been talking about, you know, having a state-sponsored housing builder? Yeah, but the point is that housing builder should be set up at a certain stage by the state, but should also not be elbowing out the actual private economy, what we have here is the private economy is being elbowed out.

26:08So the old way is a developer would go, they'd go to the, I'm only talking about property here, but let's talk about small businesses as well. A developer would go, they'd value a site, they'd go to the bank, they'd say, I want to buy the site. The bank would have somebody in there who would be able to assess the credibility of the developer and private money would go into it. Then the private builder

26:29David McWilliams: would also borrow from the bank and that private builder would also have their prices. And then the bank would also, or banking, the banking system would also lend out. My point is that's what monetary policy is. Monetary policy is about the ability or the willingness of the central bank to pass on the impact of interest rates to people. This is not happening. I'll give you a story about interest rates, right? Our interest rates are set by the ECB, so that's ages ago. In recent years, Irish interest rates have halved from 4 % to 2%. When interest rates fall, small businesses should theoretically borrow to expand.

27:11David McWilliams: Yet the Irish SME bank debt keeps shrinking through the entire easing cycle, right? It fell from 18 billion in the first quarter of 2023 to 17 billion in the first quarter of 2025, it means that small businesses are repaying money, not borrowing money. They're depositing more money in the banks than they're borrowing. So the reason why the country has never had more buoyant deposits, but never had more anemic lending, is the central bank is not doing its job. The central bank is an essential element of the bank's national macro infrastructure, but it's restricting the flow of money into the economy by being too cautious, Right.

27:52That is the key.

27:53David McWilliams: That's the bottleneck, John. So the argument against this is that, well, you know, this is what we've learned from the crash before, but it's kind of overcompensating for that. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. It's like a general fight in the last war. I think what's basically happening is that the Central Bank of Ireland, which missed the entire credit bubble, is now, as you say, overcompensating by squeezing the economy too hard. And it can only do this because the American multinationals are replacing the credit that would normally come out of the banks. And that's allowing the economy grow despite there being no monetary aggregate increases, there being no lending, etc.

28:38So where do we go from here? But before I answer that, let's do a bit of this.

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30:35This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. There are moments that reveal who we are and who we're meant to become. For those born to lead, such moments call for a vehicle of equal distinction. Dynamic by design, uncompromising in execution, the Range Rover Sport was engineered for those rare individuals who demand the world and possess the conviction to claim it. When your time to lead arrives, you need a vehicle that rises to meet it. The Range Rover Sport. Exclusive offers available now. Explore further at RangeRover.com. Mark, as you've explained before, there's two kind of levers in the economy, fiscal policy and monetary policy.

31:20And while the government are applying fiscal policy as best they can to get the economy going and build more houses and develop business productivity, etc., etc., it's the monetary policy that seems to be kind of stuck. The central bank seems to be overcautious and not lending and hoarding money. And consequently, we have ended up, as our friend David Gardner from The Motley Fool was saying, is that Irish banks are stuffed full of savings. Yeah. Money doing nothing. So where do we go from here?

31:56David McWilliams: So basically, you know, the image I'd like to put in listeners' heads is that a healthy economy is a fighting economy. And a fighting economy fights like a boxer with two fists. One fist with fiscal policy, which is the government's tax and spend lever. And the other fifth is monetary policy, which is the central bank's decision transmitted into bank credit, right? That's the key thing. So Ireland's fiscal arm is landing punches. We've got surpluses, we've got record capital spending, we've sovereign wealth funds, but our monetary arm is not. So we are effectively going into battle with one arm tied behind our back.

32:33David McWilliams: And it's tied behind our back by the very institution that should be flexing it. So the ECB, for example, has cut interest rates sharply, but Irish bank lending to the productive economy has barely moved. And it's never, in fact, recovered from the collapse that began, as we were saying, two decades ago this month. So deposits are piling up, loans are not going out. Businesses are repaying out of their own cash flow rather than borrowing. And foreigners are coming to buy Irish assets and therefore the actual returns to Irish productivity are going abroad. which is crazy, right? Oh, yeah, yeah.

33:09David McWilliams: Irish money is now inert. You know, it's doing nothing. The economy is unbalanced. It's too dependent on fiscal policy. And that in itself, as we said for many times, is too dependent on multinationals. Yeah. So what do you do? 20 years ago, Ireland and Irish bankers, they messed up, right? Central bankers missed the whole thing. They missed the whole refinancing idea I was talking about at the top. Didn't understand, apparently, even though they were apparently in charge, There's the change in property prices, not the level of property prices that mattered. And of course now, Chasen, they've tightened things up.

33:44David McWilliams: But things are too tight now. And we've never, ever had tighter credit conditions despite never having lower interest rates and never having more money on the island. I think we've learned our lesson. It's time to move on. The central bank needs to open up. It needs to ease up on its restrictions. and Ireland needs new banks to come in. And the reason it needs new banks to come in is you need alternatives to AIB and Bank of Ireland. Because at the moment, all you have is the two standing banks and they have what's called an oligopoly. They have dividend of the market to themselves. Why? Because there's nobody else in the game.

34:33Yeah.

34:33David McWilliams: So the only way in which you're going to have any sort of monetary policy that is competitive, that is responsive, that is doing its job, is having more banks come into the system, having more banks looking for a deposit, but more importantly, looking to lend to Ireland. Now, I am sure that is going to happen. I've been told that there are banks waiting to come into Ireland. Whereas there's the Monzos and stuff, isn't there? I think Monzo is one of them. I think that's the UK bank. I think that's definitely here and that's doing its thing. And I think more of them will come in. But I would just leave you with one other concern, which is the following, John, which is that if you don't have a boxer fighting with two arms or two fists, you then become over-dependent on the one fist that's fighting.

35:29David McWilliams: And that's the fiscal fist. And that's the one that's driving public expenditure. And that's the one that's driving the debt dynamics. And that's the one that's driving this sort of socialization of large parts of the Irish economy. And that, I think, is the problem. And I come back to one of the major points of the book. Your book, The Story of Humanity. Yeah. The major point of money, the book, is that money animates human flourishing. that with money people do things they wouldn't otherwise do. With money they start businesses, with money they innovate, with money they change their perception of themselves.

36:14David McWilliams: Yeah, do we make mistakes? Yeah, we do. But long term, a society without credit cannot innovate and cannot innovate itself. And at the moment, you know, you hear all these things about Ireland's too over-dependent on the multinationals or whatever, right? And we need our own industries. But you can't expand your own industries without credit. This is the essential quid pro quo, that people who save money, put that money in the banks, the banks use that to give to people who want to take risks, who want to back themselves, who want to change. You can't build a healthy economy without a banking system that is functioning.

36:54David McWilliams: And so what we have, I think, is a deeply unhealthy economy, which has been masked by the financial flows of FDI. And FDI is, in a way, not making us strong. It's making us weak. And in order for the patient to become strong, the economy to become strong, you need small businesses. You need people backing themselves. You need people becoming entrepreneurs. And you can't have that. or you can have it, but it's much harder if you don't have credit. And there I think we will leave it, that the economy looks fine. The central bank has a responsibility over and above prudential regulation, has a responsibility to be part of the institutional and macroeconomic foundation and framework of the country, and it is not up to the job.

37:53So in other words, the economy and its potential is obscured by clouds. Oh, John.

38:00David McWilliams: John, metaphorically, the economy has gone to Asturias. It has sat around thinking it's doing the right thing, looking great, looking fantastic. With glasses. Lecturing others about how it's precise and it's absolutely minimised the risk of not seeing the sun or the eclipse. and missing the whole thing. We'll talk to you next time. Bye.

38:47I'm Jake Stouck, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company.

39:26This is a new way to run IT. We guarantee you'll automate 50 % of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot. Go to serval.com slash tickets. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash tickets.

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