BIAN Announces a Reference Framework for the Banking Industry

New Service Landscape Package for Greater Interoperability

Frankfurt am Main, Germany — July 7, 2011— Banks worldwide continue to face the challenge of significantly reducing IT integration costs and facilitating the selection of commercially available software solutions to support their banking transformation projects. As a result, the banking industry is looking for a blueprint from which banks can develop architecture roadmaps that support flexible integration within their existing application landscape as well as with external solutions, and which also provides a framework for Software Vendors to build intellectual property.

The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is an international association of banks, software vendors and service providers with the aim of improving system interoperability through the definition of industry standards. The ultimate goal of BIAN is the semantic definition of standard IT-services with emphasis on application-to-application (A2A) interactions. Responding to strong demand from the banking market, BIAN is now pleased to announce the next release of their Service Landscape as a reference framework for the banking industry.

The BIAN Service Landscape is an ordered collection of semantic specifications defining unique and discrete business recognizable IT capabilities. The newly announced version 1.5 of the BIAN Service Landscape presents a broadly scoped view covering the full range of banking activities. It is the next evolution of the BIAN Service Landscape and the most complete delivery package yet; consisting of not just an enhanced Service Landscape, but also the associated Meta Model and a ‘How-to Guide’ to simplify adoption.

In the spirit of openness and collaboration, and in response to market interest in the enhanced BIAN Service Landscape, BIAN is releasing V1.5 to encourage feedback from the industry for incorporation into the upcoming V2.0. BIAN invites feedback from the banking industry on the layout, draft content and concepts underlying the definition of semantic service standards. Community feedback, both from BIAN members and the banking community at large is essential for the Service Landscape (and the How-to Guide to become a robust standard for the banking industry.

The “How-to Guide”describes the range of BIAN design artifacts and gives guidance in applying the Service Landscape within different organizations. It also gives an in-depth view of the design techniques, emerging architectural principles and design templates used to define the Service Landscape and the underlying semantic service standards. BIAN has captured its design approach and concepts in a comprehensive Meta Model.

BIAN is collaborating with standards bodies such as ISO, IFX and OpenGroup and incorporates when possible the work of these organizations. As an example, the BIAN Meta Model is closely aligned to, and draws on parts of, the ISO20022 Meta Model for many of the detailed definitional aspects.

Gartner, a leading analyst firm, has been monitoring BIAN for the past few years, and expects an increasing number of banks and solution providers to join this initiative in the near future. Banking industry analyst Don Free has had a first-hand insight into the new BIAN deliverables and maintains: “These deliverables represent a next step in BIAN maturity. Despite the current incompleteness of the BIAN standard, banks can benefit from participation now, given the uniqueness of the BIAN initiative and the delivery of incremental value. ‘

‘The BIAN Service Landscape Version 1.5 is a significant step towards a comprehensive reference framework for the banking industry’, says Hans Tesselaar, Program Director at ING Bank and continues: ‘By being actively engaged in shaping this emerging standard, ING Bank as a BIAN member takes full advantage from a close alignment of its own landscape at an early stage’.

It is the firm intention of BIAN to make a new version of the Service Landscape available to the public in early 2012.

BIAN now invites feedback from both members and non-members to further enhance the Service Landscape and all the supporting material. In order to share more detailed insights into the new BIAN deliverables, as well as the adoption by banks and their partners, a series of webinars will be offered in the near future. People interested in reviewing the Service Landscape, (including the How to guide and the Meta Model), providing feedback or participating in the webinars can find the relevant links on the BIAN website www.bian.org.

About BIAN
Established in 2008, The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is an independent, member owned, not-for-profit association to establish and promote a common architectural framework for banking interoperability issues. BIAN’s goal is to define SOA and semantic definitions for IT services in the banking industry. The community focuses on creating a standard semantic banking services landscape, while ensuring consistent service definitions, levels of detail and boundaries. This will help banks to achieve a reduction of integration costs and use the advantages of a service-oriented architecture.
Financial institutions, software vendors, and system integrators, along with technology partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in defining, building and implementing next-generation banking platforms.

BIAN Members: ACI Worldwide Inc., Axon, Callataÿ & Wouters, Capital Banking Solutions, CGI, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Postbank, FERNBACH, ifb group, IKOR, ING, innobis AG, Microsoft, ,Rabobank Group, SAP, SunGard, Standard Bank of South Africa, SWIFT, syskoplan, Temenos, Scotiabank Group, Zürcher Kantonalbank.