Good morning. I'm delighted to be returning to your annual conference and speaking to you today at the sixth FCM conference. Thank you to FCM and SOEL for inviting me to be present today. I bring greetings from IFAC President Fermín de Valle and Chief Executive Officer Ian Ball.
I'm also delighted to be in Athens, one of the oldest and most fascinating cities in the world. It's quite appropriate that we are focusing on the accountancy profession here in an ancient Mediterranean city, because this region, in addition to serving as the cradle of civilization, is also the cradle of our profession. The great ancient Greek mathematicians -- Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes -- laid the foundation for all numeracy and hundreds of years after their deaths, the innovative Italians of the Renaissance formulated the basis for modern accounting.