language. We had Europe adopting it first and showing leadership but then

many countries followed, the IASB is now saying 114 countries have

adopted the standards; India, China, Japan are all making good strides in the direction

of IFRS adoption.

So I think we are making huge progress but the big issue is still what is the US going

to do, that's just a question mark we need the US also on board and maybe they

should look at the Japanese example of a voluntary adoption of those companies

that really see the benefit of using IFRS can already go ahead and then maybe

the rest will follow.

We benefited by having IFRS out there, if we moved it even a few years

later and a crisis came in and then tried to move in with IFRS standards you'd have

a wide variety of different ways to it because you're trying to deal with the

effects of the crisis; this was done before the crisis and therefore

you have the ability to actually weather the crisis with having a global set of

accounting standards so I think that's in my mind probably one of the best things about it.

Since IFRS was mandatorily adopted in Europe in 2005 I think the biggest benefit has

really been providing a common accounting language for Europe, which was

the main objective of IFRS in Europe in the first place,

but also if we look beyond Europe at the recent jurisdictional profile that we

undertook where we looked at 138 jurisdictions from all

around the world

it shows that it's not just a European story but that out of that 138

jurisdictions a 114 of them confirmed that they

require all of almost all their domestic publicly accountable entities to use

IFRS and in fact only 8 of those that were profiled don't allow or sorry

don't require or permit the use of IFRS by their domestic companies. But

it's not just sort of what happens on paper I think what's more interesting

for me is the fact that people really see the benefit of comparability and

that was shown in the responses that the European Commission got recently in

their analysis of the effects of the IS regulation where the vast majority of

respondents to that survey confirmed that they had seen an improvement and

comparability as a result of the adoption of IFRS in Europe and

interestingly for me it wasn't just across Europe that made that observation

that there was improved comparability within their own domestic jurisdictions

so I think that's a really big achievement for IFRS.