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Comment: |
The six largest banks in Canada have been coordinating their y2k repair since 1995. Managers understand the problem of corrupt data. The problem is, these banks are connected to all the other banks in the Canadian banking system.
This was published in DATAMATION (Jan. 1997).
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The Royal Bank of Canada--Canada's largest bank, providing services to a third of the nation's 30 million people--is one organization that has already started to take proactive steps to address Year 2000 dependencies. In July of 1995, Ron O'Donoughue, manager of the bank's Y2K project, called together Canada's six largest banks to form the Interbank Year 2000 Working Group. These banks move $4 billion among themselves every day. Referring to the other banks in the group, O'Donoughue says, "If they can't accept our money or we can't accept theirs, it's no good." Thus the working group was formed in preparation for the Year 2000, explains O'Donoughue, "to ensure that none of us are spinning our wheels, that we're all doing the right thing." . . .
The Interbank Year 2000 Working Group is a success, but it's not enough: Royal Bank's dependencies extend far beyond its relationships with other major Canadian banks, and so does its involvement in confronting the dependency issue. The Royal Bank helped form a Canadian payments association for all of the country's financial institutions, including banks and trust companies large and small. The association's mandate is to look at the national and international payments systems, as well as standards like EDI that affect those systems.
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