“I WILL be made redundant,” Michael Fingleton told a press conference last week when asked what he would do once the Irish Nationwide Building Society (INBS) was sold.

“Fingers”, the man who built INBS, says the business will be sold this year. And the boss will be part of a post-merger rationalisation, consigned to the corporate scrapheap with a tidy pension, and still only 69.

Fingleton was less forthcoming about who would buy the business. He accepts that INBS is a “specialised” financial institution, and is therefore hard to value.

Specialised does not describe the business adequately. It is singularly unique. What other building society in the world would eschew a residential mortgage market growing at 27% per annum? Fingers has turned his back on the cut-throat, low-margin mortgage market; he can make more money elsewhere.

Net interest income grew 17% last year. Other income, including arrangement fees and INBS’s share of profits of certain joint ventures with developers, practically doubled. This now accounts for 40% of total income.

The Sligo man believes that it is more profitable to lend to those who build the houses than the buyers. About 70% of the INBS loan book, or more than €5 billion, is now tied up in commercial developments. And around half that loan book is in the UK.

INBS’s cost-to-income ratio is 15%, arguably the lowest in the world. In comparison, EBS, the home loan mutual, has a net interest margin of 1.15% and its cost-to-income ratio is 59%. INBS is really the Anglo Irish Bank of the building society world. And who wouldn’t want to buy a mini-Anglo? Rabobank, headquartered directly across the Grand Canal from the INBS head office, is a real possibility. So too is NIB. Some bankers believe that the ideal purchaser is AIB. And then there is Anglo itself.

The problem for buyers of the franchise is the same posited for potential suitors of Anglo. Builders deal with Irish Nationwide precisely because it is not another bank. So where is the benefit to another bank in buying custom that does not want to deal with a big, cumbersome operator? It must also be noted that a very big chunk of the INBS loan book is organised personally by Fingleton, the soon-to-be-redundant loan wizard. There are also a lot of big loans to a small number of players.

Without the relationship banking bit, and the €93m non-interest income that practically falls straight to the bottom line, INBS is just a 50-branch network. It has a deposit base that is under competitive attack and a 3% (and declining) mortgage market share. So the business has rarity value but is not overly attractive.

On paper it is worth €1.5 billion, or €12,500 for each member. Without Fingleton, it could be worth a lot less.

Pickel gambles on quiet life with audit committee

REMEMBER Amos Pickel? Who could forget a name like that? The one-time director of Gresham Hotels has resurfaced at 888.com, the British internet gaming company and sponsor of the upcoming World Snooker Championship.

Pickel, the chief executive of the Israeli hotel group Red Sea, is going to head up 888.com’s audit, remuneration, regulation and compliance committees. A number of the 888.com shareholders are Israeli.