25th November, Frankfurt am Main and London: BIAN, the independent not-for-profit standards association, is today announcing the availability of new tools that help the introduction of BIAN standards by streamlining compliance and implementation. Working in collaboration with its members, the tools will increase productivity for developers and architects implementing BIAN standards.

BIAN’s new API Align tool will enable developers and architects to find the most appropriate API for their specific project, map internal APIs against BIAN’s APIs, score alignment and certification and receive AI driven recommendations on how to best align APIs to BIAN standards.

BIAN is also working with several major platform providers, including Microsoft, to potentially embed these tools into their platforms. This will enable banks who are using these platforms to create, develop and integrate BIAN compliant API’s and code objects more efficiently.

By optimizing the process for developers and architects, a new level of efficiency will be brought to digital transformation projects. This comes at a time where McKinsey revealed banks are spending approximately 10% of their revenues on tech, but seeing an average YOY decline of 0.3% in productivity.

By effectively implementing BIAN standards, banks will be able to unlock more value from tech investments to introduce best-of-breed technologies and replace legacy architecture to help meet customer demands.

A member from a global bank who is already piloting the tool said: “The API Align Tool is critical in improving integration and standardisation as we progress our digital transformation projects. The tool will contribute to significant time savings and efficiencies as we’re now able to reduce the development of open standards-based on BIAN’s APIs from fifteen hours to just one hour.”

Additionally, the introduction of the Business Scenario Designer (BSD) tool will enable users to choose the relevant BIAN Service Domain and develop workflows based on BIAN rules to ensure valid connections to BIAN’s standards. The BSD is an easy-to-use process modelling tool, which includes templated processes to encourage further time savings and support collaboration projects.

This tool will also enable users to contribute to template development, ensuring templates are widely applicable and tailored for use. In time, the BSD will evolve from a diagram to enabling code output, further reducing the time needed to develop BIAN compliant integrations.

Steve Van Wyk, Chairman of the BIAN Executive Board, said: “The new BIAN tools enable developers, architects and business decision makers to leverage our standards more effectively. We will start to see much greater development, adoption and usage of standards-based integration with these tools, lowering the costs of integration and enabling more banks to embark on digital transformation projects. BIAN is committed to lowering the cost of banking and overcoming issues surrounding interoperability in the industry. Our new tools are another step towards achieving this goal.”

These tools are available for BIAN members to preview immediately and will continue to be developed alongside member feedback. Additional tools are also being developed which BIAN will release over the next 12 months. For more information, and to preview the tools visit: https://portal.bian.org.


About BIAN:

Established in 2008, the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is an independent, member owned, not-for-profit association, designed to build and promote a common architectural framework for banking interoperability issues. BIAN’s goal is to define operability and semantic definitions for IT services in the banking industry.

The community of more than 100 members 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 take advantage of a microservices architecture.

Financial institutions, software vendors, and system integrators, along with technology partners and consultancies, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in defining, building, and implementing next-generation banking platforms. Find out more via the website: HTTPS://BIAN.ORG/