No company is an island and particularly so when the threat of the Year 2000 bug can affect businesses globally. Until the Global 2000 Co-ordinating Group was formed last March, no-one was addressing the international impact of Year 2000.

The group was set up as an informal gathering of banks, securities firms and insurance companies to identify and minimise risks arising from the Year 2000 date change and improve the readiness of global financial institutions to meet the challenge. The group's secretariat is housed at UBS offices in Zurich, Switzerland and, in all, there are 250 institutions and associations from 53 countries as participating members.

The group had planned this week to publish on its website (www.global2k.com) the names of those countries that it believes are not ready to avoid Year 2000 computer disruption. But fearing that it might cause a flight of capital or destabilise some developing countries, it decided instead to make the information available on a more limited basis, to the United Nations, national regulators and its own steering committee, among others. It concluded that its focus should be kept on efforts to stimulate self-assessment and disclosure by every country. The group has already warned that Russia will not solve its Year 2000 problems in time. Over the past few months, the group has produced a red, yellow, and green chart to display national levels of comfort and ratings of progress for each country's systems to handle dates after January 1st, 2000. Red means a country needs to make substantial improvement, yellow means there is room for improvement and green means it is making adequate progress. When black appears that means there is no public information available from a particular country or industry.

"Y2K has a lifecycle," said Mr James R. Devlin, the Citibank delegate to Global 2000 and one of two liaisons from the United States. "It starts off with indifference. A lot of small companies don't understand that it affects them. That perception is reducing here in the United States but we're not seeing a corresponding reduction in smaller companies in other countries," he said at the Bank Administration Institute's Y2K Summit in Orlando two weeks ago.

Until recently, he said, a number of countries were in a state of denial about the impact of the 2000 date glitch. "They thought that the United States had created a myth to steal their customers," he said. Two such countries were Brazil and France. Then the next stage is panic. "We're seeing some countries doing that right now," said Mr Devlin. This should be followed by action and then relief.

In the last year, the Global 2000 Co-ordinating Group has focussed on country readiness, testing, company readiness and contingency planning. It has worked to develop a set of common guidelines for Year 2000 solutions and, on its website, has put together a global testing calendar and a "how to manual" of readiness assessment.

The group's members meet every six weeks. It costs nothing to sit on the steering committee (the Republic has no member but Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank are on the mailing list) and $150,000 to sit on the executive committee which has 18 members. Members and the national Y2K co-ordinators were the people who reviewed their country's position on the ratings chart to see if they agreed with the results.

Globally, countries that are leading in rectifying their systems, said Mr Peter de Jager, the Canadian Y2K guru, are the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

A United Nations report stated that those regions trailing behind are Russia, India, China, Eastern Europe and South America.

As of the third quarter of 1998, the Gartner Group predicted that 15 per cent of companies in Australia, Belgium, Bermuda, Canada, Denmark, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Switzerland, Sweden, Britain and the US, would have at least one mission critical system failure when the millennium comes. Mr Devlin stressed the importance of getting governments involved in the Y2K process. "The United States government has made sure that everyone is at the same place at the same time. But, only six to 10 governments outside of the US have done that," he said. Also, he added, there is a dirth of information coming from transportation and utility companies. In contrast, "the financial services sector is in good shape and there is more information coming from the telecom providers", Mr Devlin said.

The group is urging all companies to fill out a quantitative progress assessment form and qualitative chart posted on the website. "If we all fill out the same chart, we'll get consistency and then we can put that information on our website," said Mr Devlin.

By the second quarter, Mr Devlin said, companies should be defining their command centres, assessing their risks and testing their contingency plans. A global payment system test is due to take place in New York in June and the Securities Industry Association will be running tests from March through April on concurrent weekends.

By the fourth quarter, companies should be conducting dress rehearsals and executing "day zero" strategies to manage the millennium.