Europe not ready for euro
Companies in the UK and on the Continent are ‘surprisingly unprepared’ for the introduction of the single European currency, according to a survey by KPMG to be released tomorrow.
Yet most European businesses believe that the euro will go ahead.
Michael Littlechild, a partner at KPMG Management Consulting, said that the political debate ‘has deflected the chat from the question: what are we going to do about it as a business?’
The single currency is expected to be introduced on 1 January 1999, a year before the deadline for solving the millennium dating problem.
Rob Wirszycz, director general of the Computing Services & Software Association, told a conference last week that the Year 2000 issue would be the biggest IT problem of all time, and that the single currency would be the second.
Wirszycz thought the two projects probably could not be combined because they have few similarities. Solving one problem and then the other was, he said, a more practical approach, though not necessarily the most efficient.
