We hear from BIAN’s Hans Tesselaar about the progress the banking standards association is making to develop the most complete banking industry framework

Last year, global banking standards association the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) completed the development of its latest standardised IT architecture design for banks — Service Landscape 4.0. Designed by the likes of Microsoft, SAP, IBM, UBS, PNC and ABN Amro, BIAN’s Service Landscape 4.0 aims to define the standard business capabilities that make up a bank and provide a framework to help banks update or replace their core IT systems. Using this reference structure, BIAN hopes that they will be able to tackle the problems associated with legacy IT and drastically cut the cost of technology integration.

Discussing some of the key differences between the new Service Landscape 4.0 and its predecessor, Hans Tesselaar, BIAN’s executive director, explains that his organisation has made some big improvements, particularly regarding the number of service definitions it has developed. Between this latest version and the last, it has added over 1,700 new service operations. It has also increased the number of business scenarios to over 200. “We’ve completely rewritten the guidelines with this latest framework,”he says. “Following many years of development, we believe that we have created a simplified industry solution that banks can rely on to update and replace their core IT systems, and overcome the legacy issues they may face.”

This is all part of BIAN’s goal to promote a more integrated approach to managing banking processes and encouraging banks to break down siloes across their corporate, business and consumer functions.

“If we don’t have the service definitions in place, it’s very difficult to see how the landscape is constructed,”explains Tesselaar. “We are defining services and reacting to the need in the industry to deploy messages. Our definitions are the starting point of message definitions.”

Alongside its new framework, BIAN has also published guidelines about how to use the landscape. Over 4,400 unique users have downloaded the material so far — and rising. “There’s a great deal of interest in what we’re doing at the moment,”says Tesselaar. “Our membership base continues to grow — in the last few months we’ve had the likes of Fiserv and Avaloq join our network. We’re also about to host our first official North American chapter meeting as more US banks see the benefits of what we’re trying to achieve.”

Looking further ahead, BIAN is striving to develop the industry’s most complete framework. “Our focus will continue to be on delivering more business scenarios and working to understand the dependencies between different parts of the landscape to help banks modernise their services and enrich their client offering by embracing the latest in digital innovation,”says Tesselaar.