The Euro: In the City - Banks fear new computer errors

AS MOST people under 30 were staggering into bed in the early hours of New Year's Day, an army of technicians in the City of London was fuelling up with caffeine to face a 14-hour shift.

Champagne bottles remained firmly corked in the world's major financial centre, as the City suspended its traditional carousing until Tuesday.

For currency trading institutions, the birth of the euro means adjusting millions of computer programs which were designed to calculate the newly obsolete conversions between Spanish pesetas and Dutch guilders.

An estimated 30,000 City workers have been racing against the clock since Thursday afternoon to ensure the new systems are working by the opening of the Tokyo foreign exchange market in the early hours of Monday.

With so much of City trading reliant upon computers, the slightest glitch could mean millions of pounds going astray. Yesterday the deputy governor of the Bank of England warned: "Mistakes are possible".

Electricity supplies have been backed up twice over as a precaution. After several dress rehearsals, nothing short of a terrorist attack will be allowed to derail the conversion process. About a million Londoners are employed in financial services and the success of "conversion weekend" is crucial if the City is to maintain its dominance in the face of mounting competition from Frankfurt and Paris.

At Merrill Lynch, an American investment bank with offices near Liverpool Street, 900 staff were working in shifts yesterday, centred on a bank of desks in its "control centre". On the wall, status boards were updated as each task was completed.

Most banks also set up websites so other institutions and clients could monitor progress.

Mitch Shivers, the head of euro preparations at Merrill, said: "A lot of our work is virtual; every day in my home I get updates of what is happening. But for this weekend, we thought there would be a tremendous benefit in bringing everyone together." If anything unusual happened, colleagues could take the novel step of walking over and speaking to each other.

Several sofas and even a few campbeds were set up and Merrill provided copious snack food and videos for the quiet periods. It also booked 200 hotel rooms and hired several mini-buses to ferry staff during the 75-hour conversion period.

Salomon Smith Barney, another investment bank, said it booked hotel rooms next door to its Victoria offices so that staff "could be asleep within half an hour" of leaving the premises.

Merrill even laid on a round-the-clock helpdesk to enable staff to contact their families as they moved around the bank's 12 London sites. "We need people's expertise and dedication," said Mr Shivers. "But we do realise this is a holiday period."

But he promised that his staff's dedication would pay off. "There will be a hearty celebration on Tuesday. If things go well, we're going to party hard."