State development bank goes to private sector with new CEO pick

June Butler to move from Bank of Ireland to head Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland

CEO pick: June Butler has been appointed the new chief executive of the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland. Photo: Naoise Culhane

Jon Ihle

April 26 2021 04:22 PM

June Butler has been appointed the new chief executive of the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland (SBCI), the State’s development bank.

Ms Butler, who takes up the role in September, will be filling a vacancy created when Nick Ashmore left the CEO role in the first quarter to become the director of the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the State’s €13.6bn sovereign investment arm.

She is currently head of SME banking and sectors in Bank of Ireland where she is responsible for supporting the delivery of the funding requirements of Irish small businesses and leads a team of specialists focused on the needs of Irish businesses across a variety of sectors.

Before taking up the SME role four years ago, Ms Butler had a long career in Bank of Ireland and was in charge of its mortgage arrears and collections department from 2012 to 2017, a period when the bank was struggling to manage bad loans across tens of thousands of customer accounts.

The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), which oversees both the SBCI and ISIF, ran an external recruitment process to select Ms Butler. This was in contrast to the internal and external processes for the appointment of Mr Ashmore, who transferred within the NTMA to replace Eugene O’Callaghan, the founding director of ISIF, who’d been in the role since 2014.

Ms Butler is the second woman recruited from the private sector to be appointed to run a State lender, after Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe approved the appointment of former KBC executive Dara Deering as chief executive of Home Building Finance Ireland in 2019.

Ms Butler takes charge of the SBCI as the bank’s mandate to support businesses has expanded massively due to the challenges of Covid-19.

The State lender extended its lending capacity by nearly €600m under a series of emergency funding schemes and roughly doubled its potential financial impact with an expansion of its risk-sharing capacity to €4.5bn.

The SBCI's cumulative funding commitments reached over €2.3bn last year, up from almost €1.8bn in 2019, due mainly to €500m in new available funds through the Future Growth Loan Scheme (FGLS) and a series of smaller Covid and Brexit funding programmes.

In addition to its direct lending capacity, the SBCI also introduced the €2bn Covid Credit Guarantee Scheme (CCGS), a risk-sharing programme under which the State underwrites 80pc of the risk on business loans via 33 commercial lenders.

Minister of State Robert Troy said last week that the Department of Enterprise was considering loosening the lending criteria for the CCGS to make it more attractive to small business borrowers after just €265m in loans were approved in its first eight months of operation.