From Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director at BIAN

2023 was a year to remember for BIAN

For me, some of our proudest moments include the launch of Coreless Banking 3.0 at Sibos; continuing to welcome new members into our growing community and rounding off the year with the inaugural BIAN Banking Summit!

As we look forward to another year of supporting banking transformation, I had the pleasure of talking to some of our valued Board Members about how their organizations are benefitting for BIAN, and why they are part of our growing community.

Here are some key highlights:

Chad Ballard, Managing Director CIO, Head of Global Banking Platform at JPMorgan Chase & Co a long-standing BIAN member explained how Chase implemented BIAN: “At Chase, we approach core modernization by thinking about dealing with disparate technologies and data models. Our goal is to streamline this process by standardizing the data or domain model, facilitating interoperability that’s crucial for accelerating the innovation needed to transition from legacy systems to a new core.

BIAN has that value and opportunity to standardize domain models and business capabilities, allowing us to communicate in a common language, regardless of the technology or core system in use. Initially, we utilized BIAN for the domain model itself, but we’re now evolving towards integrating APIs to further support standardization for our core modernization.”

Steve Hagerman, Chief Information Officer for Consumer Technology, Wells Fargo who is our newest board member spoke about Wells Fargo’s journey with BIAN so far: “In my previous role as CTO at Wells Fargo, I introduced the Banking Product Platform Architecture (BBPA). A three-tier structure, with crucial elements like cybersecurity, identity and authentication, standard reusable components and services for the enterprise layer, including content management and statement generation at the middle and tailored solutions in the top tier. We used BIAN to categorize and describe the various products offered within the BBPA framework.

Similar to Chase, our aim was to transform BIAN’s service domain model into an entity relationship model, serving as a guiding framework for our actions. We established these services and the enterprise layer as common reusable components, prioritizing Wells Fargo’s business layer with a goal to make these components interoperable across the industry.

Over time, BBPA became synonymous with our IT funding approach, directing every dollar toward these service domains. About a year and a half into implementation, BBPA emerged as the organizing construct and guiding principle for Wells Fargo.

Additionally, to streamline topic and API alignment with BIAN, we shifted from an exhaustive domain-driven design (DDD) process and used BIAN as our starting point. This approach involves directly adopting BIAN’s solutions for service domains like credit card originations, allowing us to bypass the full DDD process while maintaining effective alignment.”

Ian G. Gillard, Senior Executive Vice President, Office of the President at Bangkok Bank shared insights into Asia’s banking landscape: “As a bank, our infrastructure closely resembles that of western banks, but the digital landscape in Asia surpasses that of the west.
Recognising the need for upgraded and flexible integration for faster market adaptation, we adopted the BIAN framework, ensuring all external APIs aligned with BIAN standards. We then started to replace service-orientated architecture with microservices, following a strangler pattern for core systems, preserving the core while building new enterprise services aligned with the BIAN model.

The BIAN model, featuring a canonical approach (using each element once and only once), has shown remarkable benefits – not just for us, but across the industry. Transitioning to an event-based architecture, we established a read-only, speed, anti-corruption layer based on BIAN, incorporating data stacks for streaming and aligning services with BIAN standards.

We advocate for building interactions between banks on newer technologies with APIs based on the BIAN framework, collaborating with the Thai Bank Association and the Bank of Thailand, also BIAN members. Our goal is to extend our approach beyond Bangkok Bank, influencing the entire ecosystem and trade interactions to leverage the benefits of BIAN – and we’re already witnessing tangible results.”

Thank you to Chad, Steve and Ian for sharing their BIAN experience, and to all our Board Members for their continued commitment to driving innovation across the industry.

This year, we look forward to continuing to develop our API offering, compliant with ISO20022, streamlining our usability, growing our user-centric mindset and building our community to establish BIAN as the intermediary between our banks and partners. Watch this space!