BIAN: BUILDING THE FUTURE OF BANKING SERVICES

November 8, 2013
Publication: GLOBAL  BANKING & FINANCE REVIEW

NATURE OF ORGANISATION:
BIAN (the Banking Industry Architecture Network) is an independent, member-owned, not-for-profit association. Its goal is to define a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and semantic definitions for IT services in the banking industry to reduce IT infrastructure complexity and enable banks to respond faster to the changing industry environment. The banking market is undergoing great change, with the emergence of new financial services players. In order to remain competitive, traditional banking institutions must evolve, become more flexible, respond more quickly to threats and opportunities and provide better services at lower costs.

One major hurdle to these developments is IT infrastructure, which is unique to each bank, expensive to maintain and slow to update. BIAN was set up in 2008 to change this, by bringing together banks, software vendors and service providers to provide a new industry standard — a flexible architecture that can improve interoperability and help reduce integration costs, which are often triple the original software purchase cost. This will allow banks to concentrate on building products and services that work better and faster for the customers of today.

The community focuses on defining a standard banking services landscape, ensuring consistent service definitions, levels of detail and boundaries. This will provide a clear roadmap, which will help banks to implement transformative change, in order to achieve a reduction of integration costs, reaping the benefits of a service-oriented architecture.

MEMBERS:
ABN AMRO, Allshare, Asseco Group, Axxiome, Banco Galicia, Bangkok Bank, Capital Banking Solutions, CGI, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, COREtransform, Credit Suisse, DBS, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Postbank, Erste Group, EVRY, FERNBACH, HCL Axon, IBM, ifb group, IKOR, Infosys, ING, innobis AG, KfW Bankengruppe, Microsoft, Nucleus Software, PNC Financial Services Group, Rabobank, SAP, Scotiabank Group , Singapore Management University, Société Générale, Sopra Banking Software, Standard Bank of South Africa, SunGard, SWIFT, TCS Bancs, Temenos,  UBS, UniCredit Group, Zürcher Kantonalbank.

KEY EXECUTIVES:

  • Executive director: Hans Tesselaar
  • Chairman of the board: Steve Van Wyk
  • Vice chairman of the board: Dominic Trotta

HISTORY OF THE ORGANISATION:
In 2008, BIAN was formed with founding members, comprised of the following key banking software vendors, leading service providers and global banks:

Founding software vendors: Microsoft, Callataÿ & Wouters, SAP, SunGard, Temenos.

Founding service providers: AXON, Finanz IT, ifb group, Steria, SWIFT, Syskoplan

Founding global banks: Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, ING, Deutsche Postbank, Standard Bank, Zürcher Kantonalbank
Since 2008, BIAN has continued to expand, with members including IBM, UBS, CGI, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Rabobank Group, Scotiabank, Kutxa and Infosys since joining. To date BIAN has 42 members.

From inception to present day, BIAN has also continued to build upon its Service Landscape — BIAN’s consensus-based development of common semantic standards and services among leading banks, banking software developers, and service providers. The Service Landscape represents a step forward for common standards within retail banking and is a formal definition of banking functionality building blocks.

NOTEWORTHY PROJECTS:
Most recently, BIAN released Service Landscape 2.5, thus delivering 30 further Service Domain definitions and 15 more business scenarios to the financial services industry. Service Landscape 2.5 is the final stepping stone in the creation of all Service Landscape 3.0, which will map out all core banking functionalities and will be released early 2014.