Vision

BIAN’s goal is to help banks enhance the flexibility and agility of IT systems by reducing the cost and complexity of integrating common ‘banking enterprise services’ in an overall Service Oriented Architecture.
Business strategies in banks are often hindered by inflexible IT. One of the main reasons for the high resistance to change in banking IT systems is the tightly-coupled nature of legacy systems and the lack of integration across processing silos. BIAN believes that banking specific ‘semantic services’ are the key to addressing these issues. The value of BIAN is the strong focus on this common understanding for banking functional services. This will lead over time to a set of standardized services.

The vision BIAN is captured in the following statements:

• Improve the flexibility of the banking industry by reducing the hurdles of semantic integration
• Help the banking industry to successfully move toward SOA

To address its vision BIAN engages in three main activities:

• Building blocks: describe strategic drivers, necessary organizational structures, elements, and measures that support the move toward SOA
• Architecture: provide a common accepted foundation and architecture to define services in the group for banking
• Service definitions: get a common understanding and define banking-specific functional IT services

These activities will over time lead to a consensus on important aspects of SOA in Banking. Any joint understanding – be it in processes, architecture or even single service definitions is immediately increasing agility by reducing cost in parallel.
The promises of SOA will hold up to on-the-fly exchange of service providers and as an extreme outlook a dynamic and partially self organizing banking network. To achieve such an ambitious goal clearly some work needs to be done and even if this is not done in a short timeframe we believe that BIAN is a major step into this direction.