Birth of the Euro: Twilight fixes save brave new dawn

Dresdner Bank HQ, Monday January 4, 5pm: Zbynek Sokolovsky looks as if he needs a good night's sleep. His young IT experts are beginning to unwind - the job of coordinating the Dresdner group's worldwide conversion to the euro is almost done. The team have worked long hours to sort out technical hitches. This evening, for example, it's emerging that Dresdner has inadvertently made an interbank payment twice - and then repeated the trick 35 times. But overall, it's gone well: a notice board listing outstanding problems has almost been cleared.

One chart takes up a whole wall: it lists the 4,000 different euro conversion projects under way in Dresdner's global organization. These involve closing and reconciling the books for 1998 in a single day, rewriting nearly 10,000 computer programs, adapting over 40,000 internal and employee accounts, and accurately transforming securities holdings. Every time a project is finished, it's called a milestone....