The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) alliance - comprising major technology vendors and banks - has published its first bank IT services standards since it was spun out of SAP over a year ago.
The 23-member alliance was set up to ease the implementation of service oriented architectures within the financial services industry through shared domain and technical expertise. Founding bank members of BIAN are Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, ING, Deutsche Postbank, Standard Bank, Zürcher Kantonalbank.
The BIAN association is based on SAP's Industry Value Network (IVN) for Banks, which the German vendor formed in 2005 as it looked to develop bank-specific business processes for delivering an enterprise-wide SOA. Other major vendors backing the scheme include Microsoft and SunGard. Notable omissions include IBM and Oracle.
Today's standards release sets out deliverables for: Service Landscape, Metamodel, Service Repository, Service Lifecycle Management, Payment Agreement, Payment Execution, Clearing, and Settlement.
BIAN says that major banks and banking industry information systems vendors already have committed to implementing the Metamodel and Service Landscape standards
"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," says 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."
He says that other vendor commitments to BIAN and SOA are also being realised, pointing to the May release of the Temenos T24 product, which signified the first formal release of a set of model bank banking services conforming to the BIAN framework.
Koen Van den Brande, group strategy and marketing director for Temenos, comments: "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."