• HansTesselaar, Executive Director at BIAN


• 03.12.2015 12:00 am
Data Management

2015 has been a fantastic year for BIAN, overall we are aiming for all of our members to work together to build and promote a common architectural framework for banking interoperability issues.

In the last month we were able to announce even more new members to the network, to help us achieve that goal. The five new members we can announce are financial services company Discover, software company Oracle, technology corporation Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Siam Commercial Bank (the second Thai bank to join) and Brazilian cooperative bank Sicredi. These organisations will now work alongside our existing members to continue developing a standardised IT framework for banks worldwide.

The new members will help to advise global banks on the benefits of complying with BIAN’s international IT model for banking business scenarios, whilst using the BIAN standard as a framework for future implementation of services and products. The model is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that identifies all banking business capabilities within global banks and separates them into standardised semantic dimensions.

As more and more FinTech disruptors are entering the market, banks are now expected to deliver solutions that satisfy the on demand mentality of their customers. Banks with outdated legacy systems, often find themselves struggling to keep up with changing expectations. Banks face a predicament – how to keep existing customers happy, whilst appealing to new millennial customers with high expectations of digital services, like mobile apps. BIAN aims to solve this by bringing together experts across the FinTech, academics and banking landscape to build an IT framework to allow the industry to innovate and respond faster to consumer needs.

APIs (application programming interface), which allow two pieces of software to communicate, are high on the agenda as financial services companies are facing a highly fragmented marketplace. A solution is a ubiquitous set of APIs that would allow banks to innovate and retain client security, whilst balancing this with telemetry around user activity that is necessary for banks to tailor and market new products. To support the banks and FinTechs alike, the network has created the BIAN API Working Group which will leverage BIAN assets (primarily Service Domains) to identify areas of opportunities for external APIs. The second phase will take the API candidates beyond the canonical model into realisable service endpoints. This new BIAN group is working closely with a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University who are conducting a BIAN Capstone project on an Open API standard framework.

We are really excited to be ending the year on a high by announcing such prestigious new members to the BIAN network. These new members demonstrate the positive influence the network has over the financial industry and how the framework is allowing financial institutions to innovate in line with ever-changing consumer expectations. Adding HPE, Oracle, Discover, Siam Commercial Bank and Sicredi to the sophisticated BIAN community will continue to boost the network’s expertise across the banking landscape.