The new members join a global community of leading experts from the worldwide banking and software industries who are working together to develop standards that help banks significantly reduce IT costs. To support this initiative, BIAN has recently published its latest deliverables: the BIAN Service Landscape version 1.5, and supporting documents, as a reference framework for banks. More and more members are adopting the emerging industry standard as a way of reducing IT integration costs through greater efficiency and organisational flexibility.

Commenting on the growing international network, the designated Executive Director of BIAN, Hans Tesselaar, said, "Following the recent announcement of our first Asia-Pacific and North American members, I am delighted to announce a further three new members today. Financial institutions are increasingly realising that today's business challenges call for collaboration with both their peers in the market and their software and services partners. In particular, banks view service-oriented architecture (SOA) as critical to overcoming many of these business challenges. This is exactly where BIAN comes into play as a cross-industry initiative."

Koldo Etxeberria, Technical Area Director for kutxa, said, "Joining BIAN is an important milestone in kutxa's own efforts towards standardisation. The BIAN community will help set the foundations for better interoperability not only between financial institutions themselves but also with banks' solution providers. The community will leverage the use of standards within companies in order to improve integration of custom-made and commercial solutions."

According to Mohit Joshi, VP and Head, Financial Services and Insurance, Europe at Infosys, "With a strong heritage in financial services, we are committed to helping the industry shape the emerging BIAN standards which will support banks in reducing their IT costs and delivering greater flexibility to the business. Becoming a member of BIAN provides us with the unique opportunity to work alongside our peers, customers and other industry players to jointly define, build and implement next-generation banking platforms based on a common architectural framework."

Alexander Umek, Transformation Director at COREtransform, said, "The success of core IT transformation in the context of mergers, major renewals or outsourcing projects crucially depends on overcoming barriers to effective communication, both on a technical, and even more importantly, on a semantic level. BIAN's meta-model, banking IT reference landscape and service definitions are about to shape a common banking IT language, which will facilitate communication across companies. Based on collective experience, expertise and a common understanding of leading financial industry companies, BIAN clearly has the potential to provide a lingua franca for banking IT, which has been missing to date."