In June we held our general assembly, approved the risk management certification project and elected four board directors. Since then, we have not been relaxing! You might be surprised at the number of projects that FERMA does with a small team.

Led by our President Julia Graham, Vice President Michel Dennery, General Secretary Pierre Sonigo, scientific adviser Marie-Gemma Dequae and I visited London for a meeting with the Institute of Risk Management (IRM) and our British member Airmic. We discussed several subjects of mutual interest on education issues with IRM.

At Airmic, we were happy to meet the new Chair Helen Pope as well as CEO John Hurrell, Technical Director Paul Hopkin and Kate Wallin, who is leading Airmic’s initiative for young risk managers, fasttrack. We were very interested to hear about fasttrack, which already has 173 members registered, since we are all looking at ways of supporting new entrants to the profession. FERMA is also talking with Airmic about its global programme compliance database Insight Risk Manager, launched in June, to investigate how we can work together to benefit the whole of FERMA’s membership.

The survey has now closed and the hard work of analysing the results is underway. We were pleased that thanks to the energetic support of our members, we received 850 replies, a record number. Some of them sent personal emails to their members to encourage their participation. The results will be announced at the FERMA Seminar on 20-21 October. Please don’t forget that it is free for FERMA members to come to the seminar – and that includes any new corporate and individual members. (https://2014.ferma-seminar.eu/)

We are working with the European Confederation of Institutes of Internal Auditing (ECIIA) to update the guidance on the risk and risk management provisions of the 8th Company Law directive. We intend that this document will also be available at the seminar. Finally, we are looking ahead to 2015 and working on plans for the next FERMA Forum which will be held at the Lido, Venice. The conference centre is a charming building directly overlooking the sea and Venice, which since the early 1930s has hosted some of the most famous people of all times as its guests. The Forum committee has already held its first meeting.

But on a lovely summer’s day, we do not think only of work, and so I wish you all happy holidays and a return full of enthusiasm for our plans and projects.