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To: Yamakita who wrote (21012)	7/23/1998 11:45:00 PM
From: JOHN IACOVACCI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 31646

Wall Street Gears Up For Year 2000 (07/21/98; 12:23 p.m. ET) By Tim Wilson, InternetWeek The Securities Industry Association (SIA), one of Wall Street's largest shared-interest groups, is conducting this week a series of beta tests and simulations to see how the stock and securities companies would hold up when the so-called millennium bug hits in January 2000. The SIA is conducting a series of test trades for equities, options, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, unit investment trusts, and mutual funds among 29 securities companies and 12 major exchanges. The trades are being executed as if it were Dec. 29, 1999. Participants then watch as the trades are settled as if it were Jan. 3, 2000, which will be the first trading day in that year. An SIA spokesperson said the tests have gone "as expected." Participants in the test said they are finding several bugs they plan to address. Several testers uncovered date-related problems in their routing software, and these glitches caused connectivity failures that forced some trades to take place on the next trading day of the test. Members of the group are working to resolve those router problems and they will pass information about the fixes to member companies so the problems can be addressed in production systems. In addition, there were certain test symbols that were not recognized by trading applications after the date bug hit. The testing group is working to fix those problems, as well, the SIA said. The beta tests are the first in a series of tests Wall Street plans to conduct on the year 2000 problem, said Arthur Thomas, senior vice president and director of global operations services at Merrill Lynch and Co. "By staging this run-through, we will be able to refine the testing scripts before the industrywide test starts in early 1999," said Thomas, who is the chairman of the SIA's Year 2000 Steering Committee. That test, which will be conducted in the spring, will involve more than 400 securities companies. Wall Street expects to spend between $4 billion and $6 billion to resolve its year 2000 problems, according to an SIA spokesman. Of course, Wall Street is only one part of a global-securities picture, and research companies such as Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group report foreign securities industries are not nearly as far along in their year 2000 remediation. If the SIA's testing process works well, it could serve as the boilerplate for year 2000-testing in securities industries of other countries, or perhaps even other industries, SIA officials said.