His job is to provide the payment protection insurance (PPI) that has become such a lucrative sideline for banks in Britain and Ireland when lending money. The insurance is underwritten in Shannon by Lane's employer, Genworth Financial, and sold to thousands of borrowers who feel they need a safety net in case they cannot meet repayments.

But life has got a lot tougher over the past year after watchdogs on both sides of the Irish Sea began looking more closely at the business. They were reacting to mounting complaints that banks are making huge money by mis-selling PPI at rip-off premiums to people who might never be able to claim on it.

The scandal has caused red faces at several top-flight financial institutions including Bank of Ireland, which was ordered by the Financial Regulator last year to repay 15m to customers it over-charged for PPI.

The regulator plans to impose tough new rules on the way the insurance is sold, urging customers to think twice before signing up for PPI, which can add more than 2,000 to the cost of a 10,000 loan over five years.

Lane says it is too easy to write off PPI as an expensive irrelevance when times are good. "People forget all too easily that unemployment could be a much bigger threat in the future and that sickness or accidents can happen to anyone, " he says. "PPI is not a long-term solution but it can stop your debts spiralling out of control while you're trying to get back on your feet. The FSA [the British financial regulator] acknowledges that it is a valuable product if it is sold and structured in the right way."

PPI is big business for Genworth and for Shannon, where more than half of the company's global PPI workforce of 640 is located. Despite the damaging headlines, Lane says the business has held up well.

"In Ireland sales have not been hit and customers who understand the product see its value, " he says. "In the UK there was a bit of a dip but that was mainly because some car dealers stopped selling insurance altogether because of tighter regulations. This meant they could no longer sell PPI."

At corporate level, the controversy has failed to register.

Genworth shares launched in New York at $19.50 two years ago when General Electric sold an initial 30% stake. Today the shares are worth $32-$33 even though GE has since offloaded the rest of its stake.

But the controversy has sent Genworth back to the drawing board to come up with a better PPI offering. This is likely to mean a switch to risk-based pricing so that older borrowers, who are more likely to claim, will pay more. It also means greater transparency so that, instead of insuring a set percentage of a credit card debt, PPI will clear the bill completely within 30-90 days of a claim. But control over the thorny issue of pricing stays with the banks and they have the final say in how much their customers pay for PPI.

"We do as much as we can to ensure best practice by our partners, " says Lane, adding that Genworth has developed a system of trigger points to identify potential mis-selling or unusually high rejection rates for claims. We're not the type of company that writes business just for the sake of doing business. We've no business selling policies to people who cannot claim against them."