It's hard to believe Mr Mark Duffy when he describes himself as "a reluctant banker". Aged 40, he has now been chief executive of Bank of Scotland's Irish operations for nine years and, apart from a three-year foray into venture capital, has spent almost his entire working career in senior positions within Dublin banks.

He is currently overseeing the final stage of ICC's integration into the Scottish bank and says he is scouting for further bolt-on acquisitions. By the end of 2001, he estimates Bank of Scotland (Ireland) will have £7 billion (€8.9 billion) on its books - a significant jump from the £41 million that precursor, Equity Bank, boasted when Mr Duffy joined as chief executive.

Does this sound like the work of a man who lacks enthusiasm for what he does? "We see ourselves very much as business people who happen to be in a bank," he says. The distinction is an important one: Bank of Scotland (Ireland), in its ICC-enhanced form, is positioning itself as a pure business bank and Mr Duffy sees the value in describing himself and his executive colleagues as low-key businessmen rather than the highly successful bankers they are.

"We're very private as a group of people - you won't see us in the social columns," he says. "We're successful but private. We're very clear and focused and, not being a public company, we don't see any need to brag about it. We let our customers tell other people and that's how the bank has grown."

Mr Duffy says that the post-ICC Bank of Scotland currently lays claim to 16 per cent of the Republic's business banking market and this should grow to more than 30 per cent within the next three years.

The Irish operation makes one-quarter of the parent's business banking profits. One car in every six leased in Dublin is financed by the bank, and moves into specialised leasing areas such as manufacturing equipment are on the cards within the next year or two.

Furthermore, expertise in niche sectors, such as the financing of wind farms and public-private partnerships - both current Government priorities - is set to become more and more evident, Mr Duffy says.

He is aware the average man on the street is probably largely unaware of the extent of his bank's offering in the Republic, acknowledging that, to "Joe Bloggs", Bank of Scotland is little more than one of many domestic mortgage providers. But this is all part of the plan: mortgages have made the bank's name familiar to the population, thus giving it a recognition factor that was previously lacking.

The ultimate and desired consequence of this brand identification is that selling products to the business community becomes easier. It's a question of leverage, says Mr Duffy, who describes how domestic home lending offered the perfect solution to making a name without massive advertising expense.

"We couldn't have paid for the media coverage," he says. "We were staggered."

Mr Duffy has consistently declined to put a measure on Bank of Scotland's share of the Republic's mortgage market and says that he will continue to do so, for fear of giving away competitive advantage.

In a way, it could be argued that such statistics are irrelevant since the mortgage launch has led to so much intangible value, but Mr Duffy is still at pains to make clear that mortgages have been profitable for the bank. He claims that the home loans can be justified in their own right, rather than as a support for business banking, but says that further consumer offerings in the Republic should not be expected in the near term, although he doesn't rule them out definitively.

Hedging bets is perhaps understandable in the current climate as parent company Bank of Scotland recovers after a £28 billion sterling (€45 billion) merger with Halifax, the British building society, which holds a quarter of the home mortgage market in Northern Ireland as well as a chunk of domestic savings customers to form HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland).

Would it not be worth using that strength as a development platform in the rest of the island? For Mr Duffy, there are two main benefits in the Halifax merger, neither of which suggests consumer business should be developed in the Republic, particularly not under the Halifax brand. "Down here, people think it's a rugby team," he says.

The first boon is that Halifax's 30 outlets in the North offer the now all-Ireland bank a physical presence in a market where its business offerings are unknown.

The second could be even more significant: "We're now part of the 11th biggest bank in Europe. AIB, Bank of Ireland and Ulster together would probably represent about 50 per cent of HBOS," says Mr Duffy. "We have all the financial strength of a bank twice or three times the size of AIB."

This status translates into an important benefit in the Irish banking market: acquisition power. Bank of Scotland has had an appetite for Irish expansion since 1989, when it purchased Equity Bank "in a dire financial state". Mr Duffy entered the picture a couple of years later, as a troubled Equity was causing headaches for its parent and he had been involved in the successful turnaround of Anglo Irish Bank.

"Bank of Scotland had bought into what was Equity Bank in 1989 and had lost a lot of money between 1989 and 1991. They approached me through a number of contacts and said: 'We need to know what to do with this bank. Will you come in and tell us whether we should flog it, develop it, or redevelop it?"

In 1992, Mr Duffy and some colleagues decided that a jump from Anglo Irish was a risk worth taking, particularly since a number of the group had venture capital experience behind them. After a look at the books, it was decided that specialisation was needed, probably in leasing and commercial lending. A few jumpy years later - "they were bad times, with the currency crisis. I'd just got married and my new wife wasn't too happy. I think she thought I had rocks in my head" - the bank acquired Smurfit Finance, a leasing company, and the high-profile home loans followed in 1999.

Equity Bank, the name that had been over the bank's door since 1965, was dropped in favour of Bank of Scotland (Ireland) in 2000 and the transformation was officially on track.

A year later, as what Mr Duffy calls the "text-book integration" of ICC within the Bank of Scotland fold nears completion, he says that we will hear a lot more from the company, which now has 600 staff, north and south of the border.

"You'll be seeing a lot of us over the next 12 months - if you got a taste of us in the home loans market, exactly the same principle is going to apply in the business banking market," he says. "We're concentrating on it and not doing anything else, unlike Bank of Ireland and AIB. Our focus is business, business, business," he says, sounding a lot like a man psyching himself up for a fight. Losing, however, does not seem to be on the agenda.