Can I just stop you right there?
Banks offer mortgages. They offer personal lines of credit, home equity lines of credit, which require an underwriter to do all of that. That's why I'm asking. I'm trying to figure out what the training dollars involved are. The reason is that when ATB Financial, the Alberta Treasury Branches in Alberta, rolled out a new piece of software to update itself to be able to compete with the chartered banks, it cost them $355 million, and there were 76,000 hours of training for their staff of 5,000 employees at hundreds of main branches. It was well over 100% over budget when completed. It hurt the brand, the image of ATB, because it was such a poor rollout. Management suffered because of it.
When we look at past transcripts from this committee, persons who have come in told us 77% of Canadians would consider using banking services through Canada Post and 11% of businesses said they would use it, but it requires a lot of investment into Canada Post to get it started. Then we have to close the $700 million shortfall by 2026. We're talking about cheque and cash reconciliation, compliance, training, and licencing. We need to have controls for money-laundering operations that you can stop, on-site security, and SAP software. Then you also need call centres, online banking, and telephone banking components that are all working seamlessly together, because customers expect that seamless service wherever they are.
I'm just worried about this huge investment in resources that could maybe be better used in something else. The core business of Canada Post, what you're all really good at, is moving things around the country, so is this a wise investment, considering all of these new things that would need to be done? There are the training hours required to bring your members up to speed on what chartered banks and credit unions do.