Spread The Word!

It's really enough to make you angry. We've spent millions of dollars, and Lord knows how much time, manpower, and expertise getting all our systems ready for the Year 2000. We've reprogrammed, tested, retested, been warned, threatened, documented, and examined to make sure we're ready. We've had deadlines set and met by financial institutions to the tune of 98% readiness (according to the regulators). When one or two of our number failed to meet the deadlines, they got whacked by the regulators - and the rest of the industry heard about it.

Now, after all this, pick up any publication, access Internet web pages, read the newspaper, listen to our Congress people talking to the press and what do you hear? U.S. News & World Report ran a feature article on March 8 advertised on the cover as "Y2K May Be as Bad as You Fear", adding a subheading to the article inside that tells you, "It's official: The millennial bug is really, truly scary."

What does it have to say about the banking industry? People are advised to save all their financial statements, and that they'll want to keep extra cash on hand. They also talk about lawyers being the ones who will gain from the millennial bug once Americans start suing one another for all the lost checks, missing bank records, etc.

AOL headlined an article by saying their poll said that 17% of banks are not ready for the Year 2000. (No mention in the headline of the 83% that supposedly are ready.) Way down in the second paragraph, you find that 17% have not finished their final testing, though all have it in the works and are planning for final testing before June 1, as required.

A popular newsletter called Bottom Line/Business in the March, 1999 issue quotes from an American Bar Association Journal article where the writer advises "...keeping on hand enough cash to pay all of your expenses for two months, which should be enough time for problems with bank accounts and payment records to get sorted out."

Even the Red Cross and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has advised taking out plenty of extra money. An early piece of advice (since retracted) told readers to go to their bank the last week of the year and get a run on all their accounts.

Take a look around you. What would your office look like between Christmas and New Year's if all your account holders came in to get a run on all their accounts that week?!

Pour oil on troubled waters every chance you get. Reassure folks as you get the opportunity that the banks are ready for the Year 2000. Be prepared. You work in a financial institution. You've probably already been asked, even in the most casual of social settings, "Say - what's going to happen January l?"

Our insured financial institutions are still the safest place for the storage of money. Not the cookie jar or under the mattress.

Spread the word, and as for those who think the world is going to end?remember the millennium really doesn't start until January 1, 2001, but then, that's another story?

Copyright © 1999 Bankers' Hotline. Originally appeared in Bankers' Hotline, Vol. 9, No. 3, 3/99