Well I think if 10 years ago people would have told us that 10 years on 116 countries
around the world would be using IFRS I think we would have put a signature on the contract
immediately. It is really a tremendous success all of Latin America, Canada, all of Europe
including non-EU Europe, big parts of Asia have moved to IFRS and what is more important when in
2011 it was clear that the United States started to hesitate about the adoption of IFRS that
progress in the rest of the world has continued, especially in a country a big economy like
that of Japan. When I started in 2011 only 4 companies were using IFRS now it's
approaching 100 about 25% of the market gap in Japan. So we still see progress also in
India, so overall a very big success. I think the fact that we are organised the way we are organised without a huge
long political process that you need for example an international treaty organisation, gave
us a lot of flexibility, gave the world a lot of flexibility and made it possible to
make the tremendous progress that we have made in the last 10 years. And I don't think
that the essence of the IASB is that it is private or public, I think the essence is
that we do our work in independence, that we are are free from undue commercial interest,
we are there to keep the markets honest, to keep capitalism honest so we should not be captured
by commercial interest and we have all the guarantees in place to prevent that from happening.
Almost everybody all citizens in the world are investors to some extent. Either by making
direct investments in the markets or through mutual funds or through for example pension
plans. So a lot of people have an interest in well functioning capital markets and to
have proper accounting is one of the fundamental foundations of honestly operating markets.
So there's a huge public interest in having proper accounting. Well I think from 10 years
ago when we started we really improved our due process; it is of all international economic
organisations I think we have the most transparent due process of them all, people can watch
our board meetings, they can listen to our board meetings, all the papers in preparation
of the board meetings are published on the internet; that is very unusual for international
organisations. Then everybody can write us and people do write us when we issue an exposure
draft of a standard we get hundreds of reactions from investors, from preparers, from regulators;
so everybody can participate and our due process ensures that we don't have a dismissive attitude,
that we take comments seriously, that they are fairly presented to the board: this is
what we heard around the world, what do you think? One thing that really has a lot of
our attention is how to further strengthen the relevance of IFRS. You see a couple of
things in the markets; first of all people are complaining a lot about the disclosure
overload, they feel that there is too much tick the box disclosure, it's not so much
relevant information. People tend to be a little bit worried about the ever growing
non-IFRS information, the non-gap measures which tend to overshadow the IFRS information. So
we have to take a close look at that, we have started a disclosure initiative where we want
to help prepare us to make a bigger difference between relevant and irrelevant information
so that hopefully they will only publish the disclosures that are truly meaningful and
relevant, that is one. Secondly, about the non-gap measures; I think we have to acknowledge
that in IFRS we do define very few subtotals in the income statement and that is one of
the reasons why people make up their own subtotals, so I think we do have to do a little bit more
work there. Try to define operating income for example, very difficult, but perhaps we
can have another go at it. And secondly we have to create a little bit more discipline
around the use of non-gap measures.