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World News / Europe Y2K: Years of preparation to squash the millennium bug

By Neil Buckley in Brussels

In the wintry woodland of La Hulpe, 15km south-east of Brussels, a new white satellite dish is trained on the sky.

It belongs to the headquarters of SWIFT, the financial communications network, and was acquired with the Year 2000 in mind. If SWIFT's usual communications systems go down because of the Y2K problem, everything can be shifted on to satellite instead.

As the date change approaches, the dish is not the only new arrival at La Hulpe. A diesel generator stands in the yard next to the modern chateau-style corporate offices, in case the power fails.

Across an elegant lawn in the operations building, the Y2K command centre is ready and waiting - a row of computers monitoring the entire network, another charting the arrival of the New Year across all 24 time zones, a display showing the volume of activity in all centres, and televisions to follow the news. There are also a few camp beds.

Even the mobile phones are ready. Some employees in the Y2K monitoring team have swapped the SIM cards - in effect, the brains - from their mobile phones with those of colleagues in other countries. The reason: a SIM card in its home country is locked on to one network, but abroad it can roam between different networks. This way, even if one national mobile operator fails, another can be dialled.

The preparations are necessarily meticulous. SWIFT is perhaps the nearest thing the financial world has to a central nervous system.

Its network carries about 4m messages a day, or close to 1bn a year, between 6,700 financial institutions in 189 countries, including banks, brokers, securities and clearing houses and stock markets. Since many carry payments information, they are worth an estimated $2,000bn a day.

Among other things, SWIFT operates the euro clearing system on behalf of the Euro Banking Association, and provides the network linking European central banks in Target, the European payments system.

If SWIFT went down, large chunks of the international financial system could go with it. The group, a co-operative society owned by its member banks, has been working for three years to ensure that does not happen.

Preparations began in 1997 with minute testing of SWIFT's own systems and components, including everything from security locks to air conditioning. Last year, it supplied test programs to its customers, giving them a deadline of last July to carry out their own, compulsory tests.

Special test schedules running from December 29 to January 4 let customers mimic the date change, and set up payments and other transactions bridging the simulated millennial divide.

The results were generally encouraging, says Paul Janssens, SWIFT's Y2K command centre manager, though some programs, inevitably, shut down, and some computers decided they were back in the year 1900.

The glitches should now have been ironed out. But the final proof will only come as the year changes.

The Y2K command centre SWIFT will use builds on its euro command centre, which oversaw the arrival of the European single currency last January. Then, however, the group had one centre in La Hulpe; this time, it will have three additional regional command centres in Hong Kong, the Netherlands and the US, linked to its customer service centres.

Usually its service centres "follow the sun", opening in turn as another closes. From December 31 to January 4, each will function around the clock. All holidays have been frozen between December 27 and January 14 and about half the group's 1,400 employees will work in shifts over the period.

About 60 staff will be in the Brussels centre through New Year's night, many more on standby. "I hope we might have some fun," says Mr Janssens. "But there are 24 New Year's Eves to monitor, so there won't be much time to play."

The group has learned from experiences with the euro. Introduction of the currency itself produced no operational problems, but there were some liquidity problems in the first week, partly because of differences in local banking practices.

SWIFT hurriedly arranged conference calls involving about 70 banks to resolve the problems.

"This time, the conference calls are already organised," says Mr Janssens. "All the numbers have already been keyed in. And those calls will take place, even if they only last 15 minutes so everyone can say they are all right."

"We are well prepared. But you can never guarantee that nothing will go wrong, because things can come from lots of different directions. We are confident but not complacent. It's a fairly natural human reaction that the adrenalin will flow."

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@AOL.COM), December 28, 1999