13 July 2009 News

 

BIAN alliance close to first standards release

The BIAN - Banking Industry Architecture Network - alliance has published its first major banking industry IT services standards to its members and the banking community at large.

BIAN was formed in 2008 by SAP and Microsoft, along with a number of others including SunGard, Temenos and Misys and serveral banks, as a "global, open, independent and unique community" that would work to develop SOA and semantic definitions to systematically define functional IT services based on a broad consensus in the banking industry.

At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this month the partners announced the imminent publication of documentation on six BIAN standards: Service Landscape, Metamodel, Service Repository, Service Lifecycle Management, Payment Agreement, Payment Execution, Clearing, and Settlement.

Unnamed "major banks and banking industry information systems vendors" already have committed to implementing the Metamodel and Service Landscape standards.

The six standards published represent a major milestone in BIAN's efforts to help banks evolve a standards-based service-oriented architecture to accelerate return on investment  from their IT investments.

"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."

"Temenos fully supports BIAN's goal of easing the journey of banks moving to a service-oriented architecture," said Koen Van den Brande, group strategy and marketing director for Temenos. "We recognise the importance of SOA and have heavily invested in our product, and continue to do so, to ensure it is fully SOA compliant. We are actively undertaking development to ensure our products are aligned with BIAN standards and are fully confident this will further our ability to support larger retail banking clients that are implementing SOA."

The delivery of these standards will help the banking industry address the key market imperative to drive cost reductions through greater efficiencies and organisational flexibility in order to adapt successfully to a rapidly changing business environment. To survive and succeed in today's volatile marketplace, banks need increasing agility in their application landscape and IT infrastructure to reduce the time and cost to integrate strategic capabilities into their offerings. Leveraging BIAN standards will enable banks to become more efficient via streamlined integration of systems and processes, as well as set the foundation for a more flexible information systems architecture.

According to Robert Hunt, senior research director at TowerGroup, "BIAN represents an opportunity for banks and vendors to develop a standardised approach for migration to a services-oriented architecture. TowerGroup believes that banks can realise significant benefits from both the adoption of banking-industry-specific standards and the creation of best practices for implementing SOA."