BIAN Publishes Six Standards for Banking IT

The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) alliance, a group dedicated to creating standards and defining SOA and semantic definitions for banks' IT systems, has published the first banking industry information technology services standards to its members and the banking community at large.

According to the organization, which was founded by Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) and SAP (Walldorf, Germany), six standards published today represent a major milestone in BIAN's efforts to help banks evolve a standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) to accelerate return on investment from their IT investments.

Other vendor commitments to BIAN and SOA are also being realized. Another founding member of the network, Temenos, launched the latest release of its T24 product in May, signifying the first formal release of a set of model bank banking services, which have been aligned with the work being done through BIAN on the banking services landscape.

The following standards documents are about to be published: Service Landscape, Metamodel, Service Repository, Service Lifecycle Management, Payment Agreement, Payment Execution, Clearing, and Settlement.

Major banks and banking industry information systems vendors already have committed to implementing the Metamodel and Service Landscape standards, the group says. It expects the banking industry at large to adopt these and the other BIAN standards.

The delivery of these standards will help the banking industry address the key market imperative to drive cost reductions through greater efficiencies and organizational flexibility to adapt successfully to a rapidly changing business environment. Leveraging BIAN standards will enable banks to become more efficient via streamlined integration of systems and processes, as well as set the foundation for a more flexible information systems architecture, BIAN members claim.