Finanzplatz Deutschland Is Ready for the New Millennium

The German financial community has successfully completed its preparations for the year-end transition to the Year 2000. The announcement was made by representatives of the German Bundesbank, Deutsche Bank, Hamburger Sparkasse and Deutsche Börse at a Deutsche Börse press conference in Frankfurt on Wednesday: "We are extremely well prepared and are confident about the date-change", was the comment in Frankfurt, "The high expectations we placed in the project have been met." Wendelin Hartmann, member of the Bundesbank Directorate, emphasized that the German financial sector had put its Year 2000 conformity in payments to the test with comprehensive tests at national and international level. In his estimation, no problems are anticipated with regard to sufficient liquidity resources nor in the supply of cash. There is also no fear of data losses. Therefore, there is no reason for the population to make sizeable withdrawals in view of the year-end transition. Dr. Herwig Leins, Head of Global Technology and Services at Deutsche Bank, pointed to the importance of information technology for companies with global operations. Information technology is a strategic success factor in the financial sector, he said. Therefore, no distinction can be made any longer between transactions on the converging capital markets and modern electronics, he observed. Finanzplatz Deutschland, Germany as a financial center, is also in an excellent position when it comes to Year 2000 readiness on an international scale. The savings banks, said Gerhard Lippe, Year 2000 project manager at Hamburger Sparkasse, the largest savings bank of Germany, have also successfully completed their preparations for the changeover. 'We do not expect any bottlenecks to occur in the supply of cash and other financial services to our customers." According to Dr. Ing. Michael Kuhn, the responsible Executive Board member of Deutsche Börse AG, the financial sector worked closely together on the preparations. Deutsche Börse Group had successfully completed the last simulation of its trading, clearing/settlernent and information systems on November 5, he said. The systems tests, in which exchange transactions were simulated taking the date-change, the year-end transition to the new year and leap-year date into account, had been passed by over 700 participants. "We have benefitted from the date-changeover from both a short-term and long-term point of view," Kuhn said. "We have been able to get our systems ready for the Year 2000- but by optimizing our business processes we will also benefit from our efforts in the long term." The Year 2000 preparations of Deutsche Börse Group have been underway in three stages since October 1997. In the first step, the Group's systems were examined for their Year 2000 conformity until the end of 1998. In the second step, the impact of the date- change on individual sequences within the corporation was then checked. This part of the project was successfully completed at the end of April 1999. During the overall simulation completed in early November in the third part of the project, typical exchange transactions were simulated together with market participants, taking the date-change into account. The tests were run for the Xetra and BOSS/BÖGA systems for the cash market, Eurex for the derivatives market, CASCADE and OLGA for the clearing of securities and Ticker Plant Frankfurt (TPF) for the index calculations and the transmission of price, rate and turnover information from the trading systems.