I worked at a bank at the time and can say that we started working on it back in 1996, and all the systems were in place and tested by early 1999 so we had no issues. It was absolutely a crisis; back in 1995 one of the mainframe programmers did an analysis on her own and determined that, not only was it a problem, but that the system would be hopelessly corrupted if it wasn't fixed. They spent, if not seven figures, at least high-six figures to get everything ready.
One thing that was drilled in from management was that no one was to talk about it because it might be perceived that "real" work wasn't getting done. :\
