each of you to urge your government to move in this direction if it has not already done so. as supervisors and regulators, we must continue our efforts to promote solid and transparent programs covering year 2000 information sharing, testing, and contingency planning. i am convinced that through the aggressive efforts of the global supervisory community and the firms that we supervise, we can build confidence that the financial sector will rise to the occasion long before january 1, 2000, which i might remind you is only 439 days from today.

indicated that this process indeed located further year 2000 problems that needed repair. thus, in spite of extensive repair efforts, some problems were not isolated until internal future date tests were performed. this underscores why every organization must build in a program of rigorous internal testing as a part of its year 2000 project schedule, even for applications designed to be year 2000 compliant. moreover, the internal testing process cannot wait until the last minute. experience has shown that testing programs overall typically consume over 50 % of the resources allocated to year 2000 projects. external tests are conducted by an institution to assess the risks in repaired and internally tested systems where they interface with systems of other institutions. external tests are particularly important where the interface is proprietary or specific to the particular business activity and the dependency on the external interface is critical. for the most critical systems, in particular payment and settlement systems, external testing must be done, and should be done carefully. external tests can take a variety of forms. point - to - point tests verify the ability of an institution to transmit and receive data with another entity. end - to - end tests take this one step further and verify the ability of an institution originating a transaction to transmit test data to a recipient through an intermediary which correctly performs business functions using that data. end - to - end tests are particularly appropriate for real - time, interactive applications. some organizations are using a series of point - to - point tests to effectively simulate an end - to - end testing process. with regard to fedwire, the federal reserve ’ s large - value funds transfer system, we have made the system available for external tests from july of this year. we have also begun a program of shared testing days that allows multiple customers to simultaneously perform endto - end testing over the system. these tests will cover the full range of payments and accounting applications that we provide and will address both the century date conversion and the leap year date in 2000, which many systems also may not handle correctly. one of the key lessons that has come out of our test process for fedwire is the importance of extensive planning for each aspect of the testing program. for example, both the testing schedule and test scripts required extensive efforts to develop. furthermore, without the very substantial amount of communication and advance planning by the federal reserve and the banks involved, we could not be confident that the tests would provide a meaningful output. naturally, appropriate internal testing must also be completed in order to derive maximum value from the external testing program. these