Five new members join Banking Industry Architecture Network

By Rebecca Gibson on 26 September 2014

Five new members join Banking Industry Architecture Network

Five new members have joined the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), a not-for-profit association dedicated to building a standardised banking IT architecture across the world.

Centred on a service oriented architecture (SOA) principle, the BIAN banking IT standard identifies all business capabilities and their interactions across global financial institutions, based on standardised semantic definitions supported by a unique set of business scenarios. The ultimate aim is to reduce IT landscape complexity, enabling banks to renew their existing technology systems and respond faster to the changing industry environment.

Taking BIAN’s total member base to more than 53 leading banks, service providers, software vendors and academic partners, Czech-Republic-based Komerční banka (KB Bank), Cognizant Technology Solutions and financial software vendor Diasoft have signed up to the international network.

Mikhail Kryuchkov, Diasoft’s international business development director, said “BIAN membership will allow us to develop and deliver the most innovative IT-solutions, while anticipating the needs and requirements of the market and our customers.”

Joining BIAN’s existing technology partners – such as Microsoft and SunGard – is FIS, a provider of banking and payments technology solutions and consulting and outsourcing tools. The company aims to use its extensive technology expertise to enhance BIAN’s banking IT framework.

“We’re proud to be part of this impressive consortium that is helping to drive the future of a standards-based IT architecture,” said Troy Bradley, CTO of FIS. “In order to more easily provide the capabilities and services that consumers and business users demand, financial institutions must address the complexity of their IT environments and true cross-industry standardisation will be a tremendous foot forward in realising this goal.”

Also joining BIAN is Capgemini, a consulting, technology and outsourcing services provider. According to Michael Leyva, Capgemini’s vice president of global practice head banking and diversified financials, the company believes that BIAN offers the foundation for a unified and consistent integration approach to establishing an integrated banking ecosystem.

“We are firm believers that standardisation will allow banks and financial institutions the tools to simplify, rationalise and improve the systems to enhance both the technology platform and business capabilities,” said Leyva. “In addition, as we see more and more aging platforms, BIAN is critical to building realistic roadmaps that are based on progressive simplification and incremental improvement verses a big bang replacement.”

Levya added: “BIAN will be the nucleus to contribute to help deliver these open technology and business standards in collaboration across service and software providers that the benefit of all financial institutions.”

The news comes as BIAN launches a new conceptual cloud model for banking. Devised by BIAN members, the model packages cloud-based services to align to BIAN’s defined banking business scenarios. This standardised approached will allow banks and financial institutions to collaborate across cloud services, rather than simply using the cloud to provide remote access internally.

“The financial services industry is still undergoing a period of significant change and banks and financial institutions are adapting to changing demands and developments in order to succeed,” said Hans Tesselaar, executive director of BIAN. “By adopting BIAN’s standardised IT framework, that separates pre-defined services into core IT building blocks and identifies the necessary links between them, financial institutions are recognising that this can support them to gradually implement transformative technology change, while significantly reducing IT integration costs.

Tesselaar added: “It is testament to the role we play in the industry to have leading financial institutions, service providers and IT giants both adopting the framework and providing expertise on its continued development. Our goal is to develop a standardised banking IT architecture on a global scale and continuing to build on our international membership base is a crucial step in achieving this.”

From 29 September to 2 October, BIAN will join its member Microsoft at Sibos in Boston, US. The association will present its Cloud enabling the Banking Industry white paper, which will outline how financial institutions can use the BIAN standard to accelerate the controlled adoption of cloud services, and define the scope of cloud-based services offered to, or provided by, external banking partners.