BIAN welcomes IBM as newest member and on to BIAN Board of Directors

London — January 11th, 2012 — BIAN, the Banking Industry Architecture Network, today welcomes IBM as the newest member to its community which promotes standards within banking. As well as becoming a full member of the BIAN community, Chae An, IBM’s vice president of financial services solutions, will take a position on BIAN’s Board. Since its inception in 2008, BIAN’s mission has been to establish a service-oriented architecture (SOA) standard in the banking industry. Having gained significant momentum — in 2011, BIAN signed nine new members, and launched its new service landscape — the organisation is entering a new stage of maturity. The addition of prominent banking technology visionary, IBM, to the Board is the catalyst to delivering standards with greater quality at a faster pace, ultimately ensuring successful embedment within the industry.

“Open standards create interoperability and accelerate the adoption of new technologies that help industries work more intelligently”said Chae An, vice president, financial services solutions, IBM. “BIAN’s collaboration with industry groups such as Object Management Group (OMG) and SWIFT demonstrates its commitment to making its banking models more valuable to its members. Through the BIAN community, IBM will continue working to address the requirements of financial institutions through solutions based on open standards.”

Steve Van Wyk, chairman of BIAN’s Board; global chief information officer, ING, said, “We are delighted to welcome IBM to our growing global network of banks, software providers and service integrators. Together we will continue to work hard to establish the de-facto SOA standards for the global banking industry. IBM’s extensive expertise in industry models, open standards and the financial services industry will enable BIAN to make great strides forward in creating a common model, from which the whole industry will benefit. As a newly elected member of the BIAN Board, IBM strongly supports the view that standardisation and collaboration across our industry is the most effective way to simplify the delivery of improved services to our customers at lower costs.”

IBM is joining a 30-strong global community of experts from the banking and software industries, including ING, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Microsoft, Scotiabank, SAP, Callataÿ & Wouters, Infosys and SunGard. Members are working together to develop standards that help banks significantly reduce IT costs. BIAN has recently published its latest deliverables: the BIAN Service Landscape version 1.5, and supporting documents, as a reference framework for banks. More and more members are adopting the emerging industry standard as a way of reducing IT integration costs through greater efficiency and organisational flexibility.

If you are interested in joining BIAN or would like to review the BIAN Service Landscape.

Notes to editor

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., Callataÿ & Wouters, Capital Banking Solutions, CGI, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, COREtransform, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Postbank, FERNBACH, HCL Axon, IBM, ifb group, IKOR, Infosys, ING, innobis AG, kutxa, Microsoft, Rabobank, SAP, SunGard, Standard Bank of South Africa, SWIFT, Scotiabank Group, Temenos, UniCredit Group, Zürcher Kantonalbank.
To learn more about BIAN please visit www.bian.org.

BIAN Press Contact:
Dee Burke
Hotwire (on behalf of BIAN)
T +44 (0)207 608 8350
Email: Dee.Burke@hotwirepr.com