The BIAN Service Landscape represents a step forward for common standards within retail banking. This latest Service Landscape provides 63 Service Domains (25% more than expected with this version) and 39 business scenarios, providing a blueprint of these building blocks of core banking systems, for use by banks, technology vendors, and systems integrators.

By incorporating the Service Domains into their own core banking implementations, BIAN members - including ING, UBS and ABN AMRO - will be able to adopt Service Oriented Architecture ('SOA') standards, to improve business agility and make significant cost savings on IT integration, which can be as much as triple the purchase costs of the original software.

The release of SL 2.0 also sees the compilation of the BIAN Service Landscape definitions into a digital repository, MagicDraw. This central database, built on the BIAN Metamodel, allows members to download material and incorporate these using their own modelling tools. This development not only improves accessibility and usability of the Service Domains for the wider BIAN community, but also ensures absolute consistency, maintaining integrity of the models and supporting the BIAN aim of inter-bank collaboration and cross-industry definitions.

SunGard is already using the BIAN Service Landscape and Service Domain definitions to build and implement its Ambit Core Banking solution. Now, SunGard is adopting the BIAN development methodology, developing software employing the same procedures as those used by BIAN to populate the Service Landscape. SunGard is providing a case study which will be available in the Service Landscape 2.0 'How To' Guide.

Steve van Wyk, Chairman of the BIAN Board, said: "The completion of Service Landscape 2.0 is an important step towards our vision for delivering full core banking functionality Service Domains. These industry-wide agreed definitions represent an integral stage in the BIAN misssion to deliver improved banking IT efficiency and cost savings. Standard definitions promote interoperability and, as such, the cost-efficient re-use of existing IT elements."

Van Wyk continued: "By Q1 2014, we will see the completion of the BIAN Service Landscape- which will cover all core banking functionality - with a total of 260 described service domains. Everything will then be in place for complete implementation according to the BIAN-defined standards."

Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director, BIAN, said: "Today's launch of Service Landscape 2.0 is a milestone in BIAN's progress, but it also represents a huge amount of work and engagement from the BIAN working groups. Thanks must go to the 65-70 practitioners from across our community, who collaborated on this and have hugely over-delivered on Service Domain and Services definitions. With banks and vendors already using parts of the Service Landscape, the community is working at a rapid pace to finalise the deliverables and roll it out within their organisations."

John Molijn, Chairman of the BIAN Channels Working Group and Enterprise Architect, ING Bank, said of the working group collaboration: "Working with people from around the world has provided great insight into the exciting and complex aspects of channels - in building out the BIAN Service Landscape 2.0, we not only identified new business domains but also improved existing domains. When complete, the Service Landscape will open up the opportunity to work on further fascinating channel areas, like mobile banking and payments and social media integration."