Mr Bob Wilmers will shortly pull up a red leather chair and take his place around AIB's grand boardroom table.
It will be the first of many meetings of the bank's board of directors that the 68-year-old New Yorker will attend to brief his new colleagues on the performance of its $2 billion (€1.86 billion) investment in M&T Bank.
Mr Wilmers is the chairman, president and chief executive of M&T, a regional bank based in Buffalo, which this week took over AIB's US subsidiary Allfirst. As part of the transaction, AIB has taken a 22.5 per cent stake in M&T and has effectively handed over the running of its US interest to Mr Wilmers and his colleagues.
He is a man of few words. This week he restricted himself to "delighted" when asked to comment on the Allfirst deal.
His presentations are likely to be brief and succinct, and he will probably let the figures speak for themselves rather than deliver lengthy eulogies.It is unlikely to trouble the 13 men and one woman who also sit on the AIB board, who see Mr Wilmers as the cure to the headache that Allfirst had become.
This time last year, they were being summoned to emergency meetings to learn the excruciating details of how one of Allfirst's star traders, John Rusnak, had defrauded the bank of 691 million. The massive fraud had gone undetected for five years and left AIB shareholders wondering how the directors, who are appointed to run and monitor the business on their behalf, had allowed this disaster to unfold.
We now know that chairman Mr Lochlann Quinn and chief executive Mr Michael Buckley had already been talking to Mr Wilmers when the Rusnak fraud broke. Indeed, some sources have wondered whether the fraud was detected by the bank's internal auditors as part of a tidying-up exercise ahead of a closer examination of its business.
This week, Mr Wilmers dismissed Allfirst's central role in the world's fourth-biggest banking scandal as a "hiccup" and says there are still a lot of wonderful people working at its new banking operations.
"There are people who worked there who were very upset that somebody in their midst could do such a thing. Customers also."
But Mr Wilmers doesn't believe Rusnak's reckless trading activities have inherently damaged the bank or its business.
"It has got a very sound business. They have the same kind of culture as we have. They operate as a community bank and so do we."
Even before the fraud, Allfirst had delivered very poor performance for AIB. The fraud investigation revealed some of the reasons why the Irish bank's US charge had failed to prosper.
The report, by former US currency comptroller Mr Eugene Ludwig, blamed lax management and weak controls for the failure to spot this massive deception much earlier. There had also been a clash of cultures between the Irish owners and the board and management running Allfirst that had led to poor communications and turf wars being fought on both sides of the Atlantic.
The fraud was the final blow for investors as they no longer had confidence in AIB's management to successfully run its US charge. The arrangement with M&T offers them the best of both worlds.
Allfirst will be managed by a US regional bank with an impressive track record for delivering handsome returns for shareholders. And AIB will participate in this top-performing bank and will have representatives on its executive management committee.
M&T has delivered double-digit increases in diluted cash earnings per share for nine consecutive years. Eleven years ago it attracted the attention of one of the world's most successful investors, Mr Warren Buffett, whose investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway owns 6 per cent of M&T's stock.
When combined with Allfirst, it will rank as the 18th-biggest publicly traded US company with 708 branches and 1,656 ATMs in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware and Washington, DC.
The Allfirst acquisition is the largest it has undertaken and has been described as its boldest move so far.
Mr Wilmers acknowledged the scale of the acquisition in the bank's annual report.
"There can be no doubt that this acquisition is a watershed for M&T. Not only do Allfirst's $17 billion in assets make it larger than any of our previous 17 acquisitions since 1987, but Allfirst alone is bigger than was the whole of M&T as recently as March 1998."
Analysts expect M&T to revitalise its focus on Allfirst's middle-market customers while reducing higher-risk syndicated loan exposure. Mr Wilmers says it will introduce its auto-lending programme within Allfirst and apply its successful residential mortgage and home-equity lending models.
Much of the head office and technical support functions will be removed and this will be a key factor in realising the about $60 million in savings it intends to achieve this year.
Analysts are very comfortable that it will achieve its objective as, historically, M&T has met or exceeded its cost-savings targets in prior acquisitions.
A key factor in AIB's success in this new venture will be its relationship with its new colleagues. Allfirst chairman Mr Eugene Sheehy has joined M&T and will continue to oversee its operations in the Baltimore and Washington areas. And Mr Wilmers has said that Mr Buckley's presence on the M&T board will help to ensure a "healthy corporate cross-pollination".
Much will also depend on the resilience of the US economy and the fall-out from the war in Iraq. Mr Wilmers says that economists are continuing to forecast an economic growth rate of 3 per cent this year and doesn't see any reason why this should change.
"We are in upstate New York. We are used to working in slow economic conditions" he says.
