By Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director at BIAN

It’s more than a decade since BIAN was founded. Whilst our remit has evolved from developing universal banking standards to creating the largest active library of financial API approaches. Our mission to help the financial services industry modernise much more quickly, cost-effectively and with less complexity remains more relevant than ever. Now, as more banks look to address the critical challenges of modernisation, our network continues to snowball.

So far this year, BIAN has welcomed 29 new members. The list of business joining includes banks, consultancies and technology businesses such as U.S. Bank, Banco de Credito del Peru, Bank Leumi, SPD Bank, UOB, CC&C Solutions, Knowis AG, Deloitte Consulting, SunTec Business Solutions, Technisys, Wipro and ServiceNow.

Each member has their own reasons for joining us. And in this post, I thought it would be interesting to explore some first-hand reasons as to why — here is some feedback from our newest members:

• We offer a respected standard approach to open banking. Wan Hua, Deputy General IT manager, SPD Bank, explains that: the BIAN service landscape is well known for making the development and integration of banking software solutions more efficient and effective. We’re proud to join BIAN and its members in the standardisation and systematisation of Open Banking.”

• The BIAN standardised banking architecture accelerates bank modernisation. Vish Viswanathan, Managing Principal at CC&C Solutions said that “adopting BIAN will undoubtedly result in a cohesive, open standard-based, future-proofed and scalable architecture within the banking sector. BIAN’s positive business impact will be felt by all of us, whether we are a bank’s customer, shareholders or service providers”.

• Our collaborative environment is beneficial in shaping future banking experiences. Lauren Robbins, General Manager, Financial Services at ServiceNow, suggests that: “industry-wide collaboration is essential as banks rethink operations to deliver the great digital experiences their customers expect. We’re honoured to partner with BIAN to define these practices as we build solutions that make it easier for banks to drive customer loyalty.”

• BIAN offers a clear roadmap to being a coreless bank. Miguel Santos, CEO of Technisys says that:  “as a new provider of a microservices oriented core banking platform, it made a lot of sense for us to join BIAN’s “coreless” initiative and be able to offer standard APIs embedded in our starter-kit to reduce implementation time and friction. We are thrilled to join the organisation.”

• Share common views on building customer-centric services. Nanda Kumar, Founder & CEO at SunTec Business Solutions, explains that: “disruption in the financial services sector with the customer experience economy leaving banks with no choice but to quickly collaborate & scale to adapt. SunTec is delighted to be associated with BIAN as they help banks to address these issues by combining their industry expertise to define a banking technology framework that is customer-centric, addresses interoperability issues and enables banks to transition from a product-based to an agile, customer-first organisation.”

BIAN represents the industry acting together to solve the modernisation challenge as one. Our continued growth suggests more organisations recognise collaboration rather than competition is the best way to do this. My view is exactly that. The more our network grows, the better and faster we will become at reaching this ambitious goal.