Bian, the Banking Industry Architecture Network, an independent, not-for-profit association, which defines standards that will help banks to significantly reduce IT costs, has today released the latest instalment of the Service Landscape.
The Service Landscape is the product of BIAN's consensus-based development of common semantic standards and services among leading banks, banking software developers, and service providers. The Service Landscape represents a step forward for common standards within retail banking and is a formal definition of banking functionality building blocks.
Service Landscape 2.5 ('SL 2.5') developed by BIAN's international community of banks and software vendors, delivers 30 further Service Domain definitions and 15 more business scenarios to the financial services industry.
BIAN members contribute to the community via Working Group collaboration. BIAN Working Groups are knowledge and experience sharing meetings, focusing on the implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture ('SOA') for the banking industry. The SL 2.5 is the final stepping stone in the creation of all Service Landscape 3.0, which will map out all banking functionalities and will be released early next year.
The Service Landscape 3.0 will provide an industry-standard blueprint of plus 200 banking functionality building blocks. This will allow the financial service industry to easily migrate to the Service Landscape, speeding up their own core banking implementations, and easing the adoption of SOA.
In February 2013, BIAN delivered version 2.0 of the Service Landscape, which provided 63 Service Domains and 39 business scenarios.
This latest release from the international, not-for-profit community comes just a month after analyst house Celent released research anticipating that global core banking spend will reach $10bn by 2017, with IT maintenance costs alone set to rise by 6.1% in that time. The BIAN mission to support industry-wide adoption of SOA aims to tackle this issue of soaring banking technology costs by facilitating ease of model integration and encouraging greater business efficiency by using of the shelf products
Hans Tesselaar, executive directtor of BIAN commented: "We have witnessed real momentum since the release of Service Landscape 2.0 in February. In addition to accelerating the delivery of Service Domains definitions, we have also furthered our understanding of the overall Service Landscape. Through a process of discussion and discovery we have found that our original understanding of the Landscape has evolved, resulting in a more comprehensive and adoptable model. A special mention should go to our Lending and Analytics Working Groups, which have really charged ahead in recent months.
"2014 will be an important year for the BIAN community. While we are on track to deliver the Service Landscape 3.0 in Q1 of 2014, our work doesn't stop there. During our quarterly BIAN meeting here in Dubai over the coming week, we will decide how our roadmap for 2014 will look. We are currently considering two key directions. Either we will broaden the landscape into more non-bank specific domains or deepen the landscape by adding more content to the bank specific domains."
Alex Van Der Hurk, co-chairman of the BIAN Lending Working Group and advisor strategy, innovation and architecture at ABN AMRO said of the latest developments:
"In our Lending Workgroup, it is great to work together with BIAN members who come from banks, consultancy companies and software suppliers. While the industries vary, there is one common goal among members: to improve business agility and make possible significant cost savings on IT integration.
"Together we are structuring one of the core activities of banking within the BIAN Service Landscape. Through building out the Service Landscape 2.5, we have defined new business scenarios and service operations for different types of loans, leases and factoring, which is a great step forward in creating a complete service landscape for lending."