The banking landscape across geographies is undergoing rapid shift with technology advancements. These advancements are re-defining the needs of customers and the ways that the banks perform business. Some of them are quoted below -

-   The shift from interest income to fee income is even more evident now

-   Social media is no longer an optional capability for banks and is mainstream

-   Virtual currencies are gradually going for mainstream adoption

-   Distribution models are fast changing with new channels and stakeholders

-   Competitors providing niche services like Big Data credit scoring, risk based pricing   are main stream and part of the bank’s evolving business models

-   Advancements in Mobility including Apple watch, NFC based payments, straight through processing for products offered are influencing customer needs

-   There is a 20% reduction in unbanked world population in 2014 and most of the unbanked are adopting mobile offerings rather than branch banking

-   The human factor still remains essential thus creating a confluence of physical and digital worlds like the branch stores to provide a retail shopping experience

-   Big Data, cloud adoption are describing the additional benefits that banks can achieve

-   The emphasis on Data Governance implementations are well understandable

-   Regulatory and compliance requirements are still the priority capabilities that banks focus on

-   The retail industry has been influencing the banks and customer’s adoption of technology

BIAN in current environment

I can’t see any other perfect era where BIAN can make more relevance and bring uplift in the banking industry. The principles, methodologies and the crowd sourced granular details including input/output parameters, service domains, service operations are standardized, well laid and evolving. I have had experiences of working with a bank having an objective of reducing their Cost to Income ratio by 12%. Most of the bank’s divisions exist in process and Data silos. This has been harvested due to multiple acquisitions, mergers, divisionally focused investments, non-existence of enterprise-benefit management. Most legacy, huge banks in North America and Europe resonate in these aspects.

Quoting an experience with the confluence of Bian and Togaf-Archimate standards

Though divisional standards exist, they are seldom re-used and differ across enterprise thus creating duplication of process and data created from then. These are major roadblocks in harnessing holistic benefits from solutions that span processes and divisions like Sales, Marketing, HR, product Servicing and many more. There are vendor provided niche services for credit scoring, P2P lending, pricing, lending that the bank has started embracing. In future, the potential of the bank to realize more such services from vendors tends to increase multi fold. The importance of product rationalization, application rationalization in SOA, is high for this bank to reduce the costs associated with supporting the existing processes and applications, Mergers, acquisitions and implementing required capabilities above the existing ones.

It all started by scoping processes and functions of the personal banking division and then moving across other divisions in enterprise using functional decomposition from existing models. Following the same, was selecting and mapping the enterprise functions with BIAN service domains, service operations to create unique views that satisfy multiple stakeholder needs. This further will be complemented by identifying relations, collaboration and parameters among services. The BIAN designs are technology agnostic but fit fine with several process and architecture standards. The service domains can be selected based on the scope of the services provided by the bank. Each existing scenario or elicited scenarios show orchestration, handshakes between service domains that satisfies a need, ex Mortgage loan closing.  The motive is to create an architecture landscape that

-          Helps transform current Enterprise to SOA

-          Drives roadmap to product and application rationalization

-          Ease Gap analysis

-          Knowledge sharing, capability re-use

-          Impact analysis of changes

-          Maintenance of current models

-          Drive change management and communication with stakeholders.

Archimate was selected as a standard to define the current state of enterprise. It complements the BIAN standards, UML, BPPMN standards while bringing the Business, Application and Technology architecture at perfect levels of abstraction. Further, as a business analyst, I would be interested in generating Business function view, process view, product view, application behavior view, landscape maps and as an application architect I would be interested in application behavior views, infrastructure views.

The way forward

Once the models are in place, the benefits are multi fold assisting in achieving above mentioned benefits. Quoting an example, there were offset products, purchase mortgages which are realized by discrete processes and applications, which have many commonalities and can be rationalized. PNC bank would stand a good example with the decision to go with BIAN standardization. This would assist them in moving their services to cloud, plug n play services from vendors with ease, reduce time to market, and standardize experiences inside enterprise and to customers as well.