• Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director at BIAN


• 06.11.2015 12:00 am
undisclosed

As a significant member of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), it’s encouraging to see IBM actively promoting banking industry standards and encouraging collaborative, innovative technology solutions for banks worldwide. It is the collective mission of BIAN’s sixty plus members to promote a common architectural framework to try to solve interoperability issues, ubiquitous with the industry.

IBM’s sharing of banking industry APIs -- with the additional operational value from IBM’s Banking Industry models -- will accelerate development, propel adoption and set the stage for enhanced business benefits and future growth.

APIs can link to partners and suppliers as well as clients and even internal departments. Ensuring relevant APIs are linked means that the systems of all stakeholders can communicate with one another, ensuring they work in synergy when and how they need to. Not only does this make sense from a technological perspective but it can also be lucrative for banks to do so. Furthermore, by centralising data with relevant parties via APIs, the IT departments have oversight of trusted communications on their networks. This puts them in a better position to spot breaches or hack attempts and fend them off accordingly.

IBM is doing the right thing by encouraging their clients to adopt an API strategy as part of their overall digital transformation. This is fundamental for any bank to survive the competitive, technological and regulatory pressures that they face today. Implementing intelligent tools and services, via the likes of IBM, will transform the application development landscape, ultimately propelling banks and other financial institutions on their journey to becoming far more functional and effective organisations.

IBM is collaborating with many industries, including banking, to provide an open platform and assist with the implementation of tools to build, manage, secure and integrate APIs powered by cognitive services. This is taking us closer to developing a standardized IT banking business framework, which is the ultimate goal of BIAN, whilst enhancing security at the same time. We hope that the financial institutions, in particular BIAN members such as ING, Nomura, UBS, Credit Suisse and PNC, are as excited about this as we are.