Lafferty Group To Create 40 Jobs

An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny TD today, announced that the Lafferty Group is to locate key educational and publishing activities for the global banking industry in Westport, Co Mayo creating around 40 jobs over the next 3 years, with the support of IDA Ireland. The Lafferty Group is a London-based banking education, research and publishing company established over thirty years ago by Roscommon native, Michael Lafferty.

The Westport activities will include the research and content division of the International Academy of Retail Banking (IARB), a new Lafferty business that began its international roll-out last year. The IARB has clients in over twenty countries.

The Academy has been designed by an international group of senior retail bankers to provide professional education programmes and examinations for the retail banking sector as well as acting as an international professional body for retail bankers.

The worldwide content for the Academy programmes will be researched and developed in the Westport office.

The Academy is governed by a global advisory board of senior retail bankers and academics. Its academic director is Professor Abdul Rahman, Professor of Finance at the University of Ottawa in Canada. It is co-chaired by Dick Harryvan, former CEO of international retail bank ING Direct and Michael Lafferty, Chairman of the Lafferty Group.

The Academy faculty is drawn mainly from the ranks of current and former retail bankers, card and payments executives, as well as from academia across the globe. The Academy provides education through classroom tuition within individual banks, mainly in the English language. It also provides open courses attended by executives from multiple banks.

The Academy expects to be accredited by the UK’s Chartered Banker Institute, the oldest banking institute in the world and by national educational regulators in Singapore, South Africa and other countries in which it will run programmes.

The Academy programmes and qualifications will have a broadly similar structure to the education systems of the Irish and UK accounting bodies and will combine work experience, classroom study and examinations.

(CD/GK)