BIAN and The Open Group collaborate on open standards in banking IT

London, 13th February 2012: The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) and The Open Group today announced a partnership to integrate their individual industry frameworks for specific use in the banking industry. Mapping together these frameworks will accelerate project delivery, while dramatically reducing IT integration costs.

BIAN and The Open Group have collaborated to produce a white paper, in which the core elements of the two individual frameworks have been projected onto each other. This is a practical document, which will be used by enterprise architects within banks and the vendor community who wish to reap the benefits of both architecture frameworks, [link]. There are clear synergies in using BIAN’s Service Landscape in combination with TOGAF ’. When applying TOGAF’, an Open Group standard, in a banking environment, the BIAN content will speed up the work by providing banking-specific architecture content. On the flip side, TOGAF provides a structured approach and adds value to the BIAN deliverables for the project approach and capability to perform.

Hans Tesselaar, executive director of BIAN, said: “The Open Group is a serious heavyweight in architectural standards. With its project approach and ability to deliver — not to mention its reputation as the anchor point of the standards industry — The Open Group adds much value to the BIAN open standards mission. We expect banks, which have already adopted TOGAF, will also adopt the BIAN standard, and the banking industry can take another step towards interoperability.”

Allen Brown, CEO, The Open Group, commented: “Having identified a need within our member base for more thorough standards specifically for banking, we approached BIAN to work together. Its deep banking industry expertise complements The Open Group’s industry-independent approach to open standards. Together, we have a rapid and transformative ability to deliver SOA frameworks to global banks and look forward to working with BIAN in the future.”

The webinar takes place on Tuesday 14th February 2012, with two time slots available. Paul Bonnie, head of Enterprise Architecture office at ING will be speaking on behalf of BIAN and Thomas Obitz, principal advisor at KPMG UK will be speaking on behalf of The Open Group.

Notes to editors

About BIAN
Established in 2008, The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is an independent, member owned, not-for-profit association to establish and promote a common architectural framework for banking interoperability issues. BIAN’s goal is to define SOA and semantic definitions for IT services in the banking industry. The community focuses on creating a standard semantic banking services landscape, while ensuring consistent service definitions, levels of detail and boundaries. This will help banks to achieve a reduction of integration costs and use the advantages of a service-oriented architecture.

Financial institutions, software vendors, and system integrators, along with technology partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in defining, building and implementing next-generation banking platforms.

BIAN Members: Callataÿ & Wouters, Capital Banking Solutions, CGI, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, COREtransform, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Postbank, FERNBACH, HCL Axon, IBM, ifb group, IKOR, Infosys, ING, innobis AG, kutxa, Microsoft, Rabobank, SAP, SunGard, Standard Bank of South Africa, SWIFT, Scotiabank Group, Temenos, UniCredit Group, Zürcher Kantonalbank.

About The Open Group
The Open Group is an international vendor- and technology-neutral consortium upon which organisations rely to lead the development of IT standards and certifications, and to provide them with access to key industry peers, suppliers and best practices. The Open Group provides guidance and an open environment in order to ensure interoperability and vendor neutrality. Further information on The Open Group can be found at www.opengroup.org.

BIAN Press Contacts:
Dee Burke
Hotwire (on behalf of BIAN)
T +44 (0)207 608 8350
Email: Dee.Burke@hotwirepr.com