Nothing was broken at Bank Albilad. Services were named differently in different domains, the same capability existed more than once, and every new partner meant negotiating a new point-to-point contract. Each shortcut had been reasonable – together they had become the cost of doing anything new. In September 2023 the bank’s Enterprise Architecture Office began a bank-wide adoption of the BIAN Service Landscape to change that.
This case study describes how Saudi Arabia’s leading Shariah-compliant bank turned change from invention into assembly, and what proved harder than expected along the way.
Bank Albilad, Riyadh – a leading Shariah-compliant bank in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Award category
Transformation Champion (participant)
Department
Enterprise Architecture Office
BIAN Adoption started
September 2023 · in production since March 2025
Scope
Bank-wide adoption of the BIAN Service Landscape (v12)
Works alongside
TOGAF, ArchiMate and ISO 20022
Three outcomes
A canonical catalogue instead of duplicates. More than 100 canonical services and APIs now sit in one catalogue, with duplicate services retired. The reuse rate across services and APIs has risen from roughly 15% to 20%.
Faster from idea to design. The time from architecture intake to design sign-off is 20–40% shorter. Squads build in parallel against pattern-based designs instead of queueing for sequential review, and governance runs inside the CI/CD pipeline.
Audit evidence without the manual work. Preparing audit evidence for SAMA (Saudi Central Bank) ITGF and NDMO takes 60–80% less time, because every product is traceable through service domains, business flows, applications and data down to infrastructure.
Why it matters
Bank Albilad did not try to catalogue the whole bank. It started with four high-value journeys – payments, cards, financing and onboarding – and scaled once reuse had become the path of least resistance. The bank names five obstacles it met on the way, from aligning BIAN’s vocabulary with local product names to teaching squads to think in domains, each with the decision that answered it. That candour is what makes the story useful to institutions about to start.
“By standardising on BIAN service domains and canonical APIs in ABACUS, we have converted fragmented, project-specific work into reusable building blocks – accelerating time-to-market, cutting integration defects, and embedding compliance by design.”
Bank Albilad, from its submission to the BIAN Transformation Awards 2025
