Thank you very much Joe. This is Russell Sacks. It's a pleasure to be speaking today on the subject of a midyear update on what we're hearing from the regulators in particular SEC and FINRA on securities regulation and securities enforcement trend. With me today is my friend and colleague Jennifer Morton. We work in the financial institutions advisory group at Shearman & Sterling where we're very, very lucky to work with many banks and broker dealers across the globe and especially focusing on those that work with those US broker dealers that are regulated by the SEC and FINRA. Also with us today our thanks to the second most Irish person in the room, our colleague Sean Kelly, for his assistance with this presentation.

Before we get started into the substance, you have ... there is a set of materials here today. As always the set of materials contains more content than we will have time to get through. Our purpose today is to get through as much of it as we can in a sort of coherent way, but with that said, many specific topics, many specific issues are covered towards the backend of the slide deck. The ways in which the subject matter that we speak about and the things that the regulators are saying, feed to specific subject matter, tends to be covered toward the back end of the presentation. We'll get through as much of that as we can, but to the extent we don't, they'll find hopefully good reference material there.

In terms of the agenda for the next, call it, 35 to 40 minutes of presentation, we're going to start by talking about some of the higher level actions that we've seen in financial regulation in 2017. We'll talk about major White House and Congressional actions. We hope to keep that to something in the order of 7 to 10 minutes. We're going to talk about major action that's promised and some of the specific things that the regulators are promising or threatening, depending on how you look at things. Then we'll get into specifically what the regulators are saying in 2017, in respect of financial regulation and trends in financial regulation. Following that, we will touch on as many specific subjects as we can with some regulatory updates on specific subject. Then break for questions.

With that said, I'm going to turn the microphone over to my friend and colleague, Jennifer to discuss major White House and Congressional action and to talk about what the White House, the Congress, the SEC and FINRA are promising in the short and medium term. Jennifer?

Hi everybody, I'm Jennifer Morton. Thanks very much for the introduction Joe and Russell. Thanks everybody for joining the webinar today, it's a pleasure to be here. We're going to kick off the presentation with a slide entitled Securities Regulation. It's slide six if you can see the numbers. Without further ado, we'll go ahead.