Steven Van Wyk, Executive Vice President, Head of Technology and Operations, PNC Financial Services Group explains the benefits of aligning the bank’s enterprise architecture to the BIAN model.

The BIAN model fits perfectly in line with how we view enterprise architecture (EA) at PNC. One of the first steps we took as an organisation was to bring a business perspective to enterprise architecture. To us, technology is not just a collection of servers and software, but rather a set of technical solutions that are aligned to specific business capabilities and functions.

1) Adding the business view

To begin, we looked at every application that existed in our portfolio and mapped it to the aligned BIAN service domains (specific business functions) in our EA management tool.

This gave us a clear view of systems that were providing similar or overlapping capabilities, which could be optimised, while also creating a consistent and replicable way to evaluate proposed new solutions for our application portfolio.

2) Creating a bank on a page

This allowed us to create a business driven “bank on a page”heat map, using BIAN’s M4 model, to show what areas were suffering from obsolescence and compliance issues. As we move forward, we can align our risk and project portfolio views to the same bank on a page overview.

Using BIAN’s framework, we can move our core platforms into a componentised framework, which allows us to manage our transformation in logical steps that are aligned with the overall business strategy.

3) Positioning for disruptive industry change

Defining our technology into capabilities in this way also sets us up for future innovation. The proliferation of FinTech is setting new expectations with new business models that sometimes compete directly with banks. We are evolving our core banking capabilities into a componentised framework that will allow us to embrace evolving business expectations and customer demands. The search for innovation partnerships becomes easier when you are no longer tied to the past era’s monolithic application approaches. We are exploring open banking APIs, for example, in a collaborative project with BIAN and Carnegie Mellon University. By aligning to the BIAN framework we are assured that our enterprise architecture can continuously adapt to new market and technology demands.

By aligning to the BIAN framework we are assured that our enterprise architecture can continuously adapt to new market and technology demands.