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Just a short reaction on the comment posted by Ketharaman Swaminathan; the examples you describe can be easily expanded by ATM-usage or payments between banks using the SWIFT Standard. They are all examples of B2B connectivity / standardization. Were BIAN is focusing on is A2A standardization. It is still not possible to seamlessly integrate an “off the shelf” banking system in a multi-vendor environment. BIAN is trying to achieve that by defining a SOA standard for usage within the boundaries of a bank. By doing so the industry will be able to renew their existing IT-landscape at significant lower cost and at the same time simplify their infrastructure to avoid serious breakdowns as we have seen in the recent period at some major banks.

The Standard I'm refering to is of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) they developing semantic service definitions to apply in a SOA environment.  The BIAN Service Definitions covers the whole application landscape of a bank. So it includes the interaction between the different business activities within the CBS, but also between the CBS and all the surrounding areas like Channels or HR.

This standard is being developed by Banks, Service Providers and Software Vendors with a global presence, so not restricted to Europe.

For most banks, it’s still quite an achievement to seamlessly connect the front of the value chain, such as e-invoicing or e-payments, with their fragmented back offices. The main objective at my organisation is to facilitate this seamless connectivity and we are working closely with SWIFT to ensure the (re)use of most of the ISO20022 messages.