Indeed, it is the infancy of the technology itself. Standards are still emerging for methods to develop software. We take for granted that the things that once only a blacksmith could do are highly automated by machines in the industrial age. To complicate matters, the ability to respond to Y2K is related to current economic conditions. I think our best chance at avoiding a Y2K economic problem, requires a strong economy that can support spending money to retire, repair, or replace software.
Many systems are unaware of the year, or insensitive to it.
If a financial institute fails at conversion, it will be a new type of failure. Usually a bank would fail because of bad loans it has made or other balance sheet problems. Is it not also quite possible, that instead of having banks fail in 2000, that their problem becomes clear before then. In this case, I think, that what might occur is that other banks would acquire the banks that are in good shape, except for their soon to fail technologies. Or simply transfer the accounts to their already compliant computers.