Axon becomes a founding member of the
Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN)

13/05/08

The Banking Industry Architecture Network has been launched by seventeen members, including Axon, with the goal to help banks ease the transition to an SOA by gathering together a community of industry leading players and global banks who will openly share domain and technical expertise to apply SOA principles and methodologies.

Based on the foundation of the Industry Value Network (IVN) for Banks created by SAP, the seventeen founding members are Axon, Callatay & Wouters, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Postbank, Finanz IT, ifb group, ING, Microsoft, SAP, Standard Bank, Steria, SunGard, SWIFT, Syskoplan, Temenos and Zurcher Kantonalbank.

While IT infrastructure is seen as a key component to a bank's operations, outdated and incompatible legacy systems are increasingly becoming a hindrance in tightly linked, global financial markets. As an association, BIAN members will work within the industry to enable a non-disruptive, step-by-step evolution toward SOA. It will work to create a blueprint to help banks more flexibly use software to run core banking processes and achieve better interoperability among their IT systems allowing them to reduce risk and costs while improving overall operations. The open forum will offer a wide adoption of industry enterprise services and will globally enable banks to easily utilize the results of this collaborative effort.

A goal of BIAN is to define and encourage the development and implementation of standardized services, which will help banks in their daily operations by creating operational efficiencies and allowing them to focus on growth, time-to-market and the increasing demands from their customers. Financial institutions, software vendors and service providers, along with technology partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in the definition, building and implementation of next-generation banking platforms.

Banking Industry Architecture Network Creating and Building Enterprise Services for Banks

One of the key challenges for SOA in banking lies in the semantic definition of services that will provide a more flexible and modularized IT landscape. In 2005, SAP and its banking advisory board began the journey to address this challenge by creating the industry value network (IVN) group for Banks.

The IVN banking group, comprised of 37 financial services institutions and software providers, was tasked with combining their own experiences with expertise from SAP to define important SOA services and create the blueprint for a successful transition from today's tightly coupled IT landscape. Recently formed as an association according to German law, BIAN has an open intellectual property policy, which helps ensure that the specifications that emerge from this collaboration can be implemented on a variety of technology platforms.

BIAN members will work closely with:

• Standards bodies: BIAN will strive wherever possible to encourage the adoption of standards already in existence, while working collaboratively with standards bodies for the benefit of the industry as a whole
• Global banks: BIAN will work with banks worldwide on the definition of enterprise services that maps closely to banks' in-house target architectures for next-generation SOA and business process management- based banking platforms
• Software vendors and systems integrators: BIAN will work with leading independent software vendors and systems integrators worldwide who want to build and implement enterprise services for banks to use with their in-house and software vendors' platforms.

Doug Gadaloff, Axon's Head of Banking, commented, "The diversity of organizations involved in BIAN (including banks, software vendors and software implementers) provides the right mix of SOA theory and inherent banking process knowledge with the practicalities of implementation. BIAN will help shape the future development of Banking software.”

Further information on the BIAN can be found at www.bian.org