Wells Hires Dallas Firm to Resolve Glitches in Year-2000 Programming

Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco has selected BRC Holdings Inc. to help it fix year-2000 programming bugs on the wholesale side of the bank.

Dallas-based BRC plans to run Wells' computer code through software that categorizes the lines and identifies those likely to have trouble dealing with references to dates after Dec. 31, 1999.

The code then will be sent to BRC's parent company, Matridigm Corp., in San Jose, Calif., which will fix it using "windowing" techniques. Windowing inserts logic into the lines of code that clarifies whether references to years after 1999 belong to this century or the next.

BRC provides documentation that lets programmers see the details of all code alterations. This will give Wells a tool to help fix glitches that might result from year-2000 code changes.

"It gives them an audit trail of everything that has been done to their code," said Stan Coffee, BRC's executive vice president of technology service.

The $98 billion-asset Wells Fargo is parceling out its year-2000 fixes to several vendors. BRC has also analyzed code in the retail banking and credit card areas.

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