In support of the vision that setting industry standards will enable banks to minimize IT risk and integration costs, focus on their strategic priorities and allow a much closer alignment between the business and IT sides, UniCredit Group has joined the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN).
With its various members from the banking, software vendor and system integrator industries, BIAN is proud to announce the addition of UniCredit and is looking forward to closely working with UniCredit to continue further collaborative efforts in defining and implementing standardized specifications of enterprise services interfaces. The joint deliverables are expected to reduce integration efforts and support banking services produced both in-house as well as commercially.
Being a pan-European banking organization, UniCredit brings with it valuable knowledge of changing IT needs in banking, and this will help to define future interoperability in the banking ecosystem. UniCredit and BIAN share a common vision about interoperable architectures in banking and a common understanding regarding the strategic evolution of core banking systems.
"Joining BIAN means more than just adding our name to a member list. It's the first step in actively taking part in developing and refining standards to unify the SOA landscape in the banking industry and make integration easier, more flexible and more cost efficient," says Patrizia Iacovone, Head of ICT Strategy at UniCredit.
BIAN is an independent, member owned, not-for-profit association. It was created to establish, promote, and provide a common framework for banking interoperability issues. BIAN brings banks, vendors of banking applications, and service providers together as a community to achieve synergies by collaborating on a consensus understanding of the requirements for banking enterprise services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework. "Having UniCredit as a member is of tremendous value to BIAN. Our members work closely together to share knowledge and experience around integration requirements for banking, and it is extremely beneficial to have the active input of a company with so much experience in integrating and managing complex IT systems for banking," explains Karin Fischenbeck, Secretary General of BIAN.
UniCredit is a major international financial institution with strong roots in 22 European countries as well as representative offices in 27 other markets, with approximately 10,000 branches, over 166,000 employees at 31 December 2009. In the CEE region, UniCredit operates the largest international banking network with over 4,000 branches and outlets. The Group operates in the following countries: Austria Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and Ukraine.
UniCredit Group is very familiar with the technical challenges involved integrating different standards and responding to the rapidly changing business environment and IT needs of the banking industry.
In fact, since its inception in 2008, BIAN has grown at a steady pace as businesses from the banking and software industries continue to recognize the need for unified SOA and the benefits that it offers. Another recent addition to BIAN is Capital Banking Solutions, which provides a whole range of solutions designed for banks and is dedicated to banking services throughout EMEA, North and Latin Americas and the Caribbean.
"Modern banking is all about service, and services today depend on highly flexible IT structures that are able to shift to meet industry needs as they occur. Achieving this would be exceedingly difficult and impractical without SOA, and BIAN is doing essential work in this area. Therefore, we made the decision to join BIAN," said Michel Tueni, General Manager at Capital Banking Solutions.