Vision

BIAN has a VISION of an industry-wide consensus regarding an architecture for banking systems which is closely aligned with the business objectives of agility and reduced cost and is based on the concept of achieving the flexibility required for this by implementing semantic standards-based interoperability of in-house built, as well as commercially productized banking IT 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.