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Business partners that miss deadlines are threatened with fines
VISA INTERNATIONAL, Inc. has threatened to impose fines of more than $160,000 per month on any of its 20,000 member banks, as well as creditcard processors and merchants, that fail to make their creditcard processing systems year 2000-compliant.
Visa is using the threat of financial penalties to force a few slow-moving business partners to speed up their year 2000 conversion work.
Other businesses may try the same tactic, analysts said. "Penalize or remove the franchise - that will become a common practice," said George Kivel, a technology analyst at The Tower Group, a financial services consultancy in Newton, Mass.
EARLY EXPIRATION
Visa in San Mateo, Calif, the world's largest credit-card company, is launching the penalty system to ensure that the systems in its consortium can process cards with expiration dates that read "oo" or higher in the year field. Otherwise, systems will conclude that valid cards have expired.
"We decided...