Matthew Elderfield, financial regulator: The future face of Irish financial services

There was no honeymoon period for Matthew Elderfield when he was appointed as Ireland’s new banking regulator in January. He quickly had to roll up his sleeves and deal with the solvency issues of one of the country’s biggest insurers, Quinn Insurance. “I knew we had some big problems on the banking side,” he says, “but to find that one of the largest insurance companies in the country had a severe solvency problem and needed to be put into administration, within three months of me arriving, was a big challenge.”