Results published last week showed that lending surged 44% in 2005, pushing the loan book to 4.4bn and marking a return to the heady growth last seen during the eventful reign of Jim Lacey a decade earlier. Even before NIB rolls out its revamped product range at Easter, it is already staking its claim in the booming home loans market.

Its offset mortgage is arguably the best of its kind on the market, netting money in customers' current and savings accounts against their mortgage debts in an effort to cut their interest bills. NIB is also poaching business from rival lenders with cash inducements of 1,000 and the chance to lock into low fixed rates before the next interest hike.

Chief executive Andrew Healy hands the credit to the new Danish owners who, he says, have given NIB staff a new sense of something to aim for.

"There's been a real impetus since the Danes came on board, " he says. "We're operating to a better business model. Our structures and credit model are different than before."

Healy's attention is currently focused on the huge task of restructuring the bank, decoupling it from previous owner National Australia Bank and linking into the rigid template that Danske uses to run all of its subsidiaries across Scandinavia.

The associated costs plus goodwill write-offs kept NIB in the red in 2005 and, with a 70m investment programme still underway, it could be some time before it returns to profit.

Some of the money will be spent on new branches. Only 13 of NIB's 59 outlets lie south of a line from Galway to Dublin so Munster and south Leinster are seen as top priorities in the bank's fight to grow its puny 3% market share. Healy originally planned to divide the region in two but has now decided to appoint one general manager to oversee the lot.

"I wanted to hire a strong executive for the Munster region and, to get the right person for the job, we needed to give him or her a bigger patch to play on, " he says.

The job has already been filled and the successful candidate will be revealed as soon as contracts are signed.

In addition to Munster, NIB is organised into three other regions: Dublin, Midlands and Northwest. The first two are headed by NIB lifers while Healy has poached Garry Duffy from Ulster Bank to head up the Northwest region.

The Danes are tight lipped about how quickly they want to see a return on their 1.3bn investment in NIB and its Belfast-based cousin, Northern Bank. But they will expect new branches to quickly pay their way. The target will be the same as in Sweden, where Danske's new branches are expected to break-even after two years and to recoup all of the set-up costs after four years.

Products and pricing are being kept under wraps until after the Easter launch but the tech-savvy Danes have made it clear that customers who help themselves by banking online or by phone will pay less. A similar strategy was tried by Bank of Ireland some years ago but quickly ran into trouble when older customers complained that they were being elbowed out of the branches.

Healy says NIB will never penalise customers for using its branches. "If there's less labour and cost involved in paying an ESB bill over the internet, we're likely to pass on the savings to our customers, " he says. "But our model is not about driving traffic towards the phones or internet."

In deciding to spend so much money to break into Ireland, the Danes were heavily influenced by a study of productivity in European banking by top-flight consultants McKinsey. It ranked Scandinavia at the top of the table and the Irish banks at the bottom, largely because they have let efficiency slip as they struggled to keep up with all of the business in recent years.

In theory this presents a textbook opportunity to transplant Scandinavian productivity into Ireland's booming banking market. We have yet to see if the theory will work in practice.