Progress?
Banks Will Share Millennium Bug Plans On Internet
LONDON (Reuters) - Five financial institutions have agreed to make public their plans for fixing the millennium computer bug.
The Global 2000 Coordinating Group said in a statement Friday that JP Morgan, Citibank and Merrill Lynch of the United States, DBS Bank of Singapore and UBS of Switzerland will shortly display detailed assessments of the progress they are making on the Internet.
Global 2000, which comprises 180 financial institutions from 37 countries, said it had released an analytical tool to allow institutions worldwide to evaluate their readiness.
Experts believe computers may crash at midnight Dec. 31, 1999, because many systems store dates using only the last two digits of the year and cannot cope with the double zeros of 2000. Computers may shut themselves down or spew out erroneous data when their year counters roll over from 99 to 00.
Banks and financial institutions are in the forefront of efforts to combat the problem, but much work remains.
''To facilitate ease of access to this (millennium readiness) data, these firms will publish their self-assessments on their individual web sites and will link these disclosure statements to the Global 2000 web site at www.global2k.com,'' Global 2000 said in a statement.
The statement was released at the Global Year 2000 summit conference organized by the 29-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank and the International Chamber of Commerce.
''When used by the world financial community, the Global 2000 self-assessment will provide the public with the unprecedented ability to assess the state of readiness of the international financial community to meet the challenge of the year 2000,'' the statement said.
Tim Shepheard-Walwyn, chairman of Global 2000, said knowledge of the bug among computer users is often incomplete.
''Global 2000 calls upon all financial regulators to endorse the comprehensive approach which we have today adopted and to use it as the basis for requesting information from financial firms and reviewing the adequacy of their year 2000 programs,'' Shepheard-Walwyn said in a statement.
''We call upon the financial community to release the results of their assessments at the earliest possible time,'' he said. |
