Embed Notice

@drahardja Here's the Reserve Bank of Australia's report on all the work that was done across the financial services industry to prepare for Y2K: https://www.rba.gov.au/fin-services/resources/y2k-preps.pdf

It's worth noting the Australian financial year ends on 30 June. So a lot of changes had to be in place by then (in case there were problems caused by financial year 00 appearing in any systems).

There was also a bit of a dry run in January 1999, when the euro was introduced (something a lot of articles leave out).

"There was significant progress during the June 1999 quarter, with more than half of the banks reporting at end-June that all critical systems had been completely renovated and tested. Most of the remaining banks finalised testing during July and August. The few remaining systems where testing is yet to be finalised are systems where any problems would have little or no impact on retail bank accounts or the payments system.

"A comprehensive program to test the Year 2000 readiness of the Australian payments system, managed by the Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA), was successfully completed, on time, by 30 June 1999 and no Year 2000 problems were reported by test participants. Because of this effort, the Australian public can be
confident that their usual method of making non-cash payments, such as ATMs, EFTPOS and credit cards, will continue to work as usual over the New Year period.

"Credit unions have approached Year 2000 preparations from an industry viewpoint. There has been a high level of cooperation between individual institutions and
considerable assistance from industry special service providers.

"The June 1999 returns indicated that the very large majority of building societies and credit unions had completed the testing and implementation phase of their Year 2000
project by end-June 1999. Where there has been some slippage in testing timetables,
this has been largely due to external service providers, an issue that was addressed by
additional testing periods in July and August. FI Scheme supervisors have encouraged
institutions to impose a freeze on changes to critical applications over the two main
periods of risk."

Non-Y2K updates to systems were also frozen at many financial institutions:

"APRA has also written to institutions suggesting that they should consider setting
periods in the latter part of 1999 and early 2000 (including the period around
29 February 2000) during which changes to critical systems will only be undertaken
if deemed absolutely necessary. This is to ensure that any changes do not introduce errors into systems that have already been tested. Most institutions have put in place a freeze period on changes to critical applications."