Y2k info on credit cards:
In a nutshell: none of the major credit cards companies anticipated
this problem (duh!), and it first hit them in 1996 when their member
banks began issuing 4-year renewal cards. Visa apparently had to
withdraw 12 million cards at that point, and all three of the big
organizations (Visa, MC, and Amex) began working on a solution.
At this point, they're okay; and as far as I know, the thousands of
member banks who actually issue the cards are okay. The big problem,
all along, has been the credit-authorization machines (card swipers)
owned or leased by some 14 million merchants, together with whatever
sophisticated "in-store" POS systems those merchants might have.
Visa claims that 99% of the merchants have now upgraded, and they've
begun issuing "00" cards at the beginning of this years, as has MC.
Amex has not yet done so, because they're not convinced that a
sufficient number of their merchants are ready.
But in any case, all of this is actually GOOD news: if all of the
organizations around the world were at the stage where they had
finished their code-fixing and their testing, and were ready to
unleash new systems upon the world in order to "flush out" the 1%
problem situations, we would have nothing to worry about.
In this case, they were dealing with an utterly trivial aspect of the
Y2000 problem: the credit-authorization systems were simply rejecting
the cards, because they assumed that the expiration date was 1900.
None of this involves the complex date-arithmetic logic you're going
to find in a lot of financial systems...
Synopsis by Ed Yourdon
www.yourdon.com |
