Microsoft Announces First Major Milestone

REDMOND, Wash. – July 13, 2009 – Microsoft Corp. today announced that the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) alliance has published the first major banking industry information technology (IT) services standards to its members and the banking community at large.

The six standards published today represent a major milestone in BIAN’s efforts to help banks evolve a standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) to accelerate return on investment (ROI) from their IT investments. The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 (WPC09) held in New Orleans July 13—16, 2009.

“The implementation of an SOA is an important goal for banks, and almost every bank is well under way in its efforts to evolve to an SOA,”said Oliver Kling, secretary general for BIAN. “The BIAN initiative consequently represents a real opportunity for banks to accelerate replacement of inflexible legacy environments, create IT and ultimately business agility, and reduce integration costs without simply slashing costs. BIAN promotes interoperability among banking services and application providers by the definition and adoption of semantic industry standards. By working with BIAN, banks now will be able to leverage the world’s best practices.”

“Microsoft is committed to lowering the cost of ownership and providing a more flexible and innovative platform for banking,”said Susan Hauser, vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft. “In addition, we consider an open standards-based environment critical to our success. As a founding and active member of BIAN, Microsoft is enabling global collaboration with key thought leaders in the banking and IT communities around the establishment of technology standards and SOA best practices. In doing so, BIAN will be instrumental in laying the groundwork for the banking industry services in the new economy.”

Read on at MICROSOFT …