The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), a not-for-profit association dedicated to building a standardised banking IT architecture, is today announcing five new members.
FIS, Cognizant, Diasoft and Capgemini are among the latest global financial and technology corporations to join the fast-growing network.
FIS, the world's largest provider of banking and payments technology solutions and a global leader in consulting and outsourcing solutions, will use the organizations vast technology expertise to enhance BIAN's banking IT framework - joining existing technology members including IBM, Microsoft and SunGard.
Centred on a service oriented architecture (SOA) principle, the BIAN banking IT standard identifies all business capabilities and their interactions across global financial institutions, based on standardised semantic definitions supported by a unique set of business scenarios. The ultimate goal is to reduce IT landscape complexity, enabling banks to renew their existing technology systems and respond faster to the changing industry environment.
BIAN, which already has members spanning every continent, will also be expanding its global presence. Leading Czech-Republic-based banking institution KB Bank has also joined the not-for-profit organisation.
Taking BIAN's total member base to in excess of 53 leading banks, service providers, software vendors and academic partners, Cognizant Technology Solutions and the leading financial software vendor Diasoft have also signed up to the international network.
The news comes as BIAN launches a new conceptual cloud model for banking. Devised by BIAN members, the model packages cloud-based services to align to BIAN's defined banking business scenarios. This standardised approached will allow banks and financial institutions to collaborate across cloud services, rather than simply using the cloud to provide remote access internally.
Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director of BIAN commented: "The financial services industry is still undergoing a period of significant change and banks and financial institutions are adapting to changing demands and developments in order to succeceed.
"By adopting BIAN's standardised IT framework, that separates pre-defined services into core IT building blocks and identifies the necessary links between them, financial institutions are recognising that this can support them to gradually implement transformative technology change, while significantly reducing IT integration costs.
"It is testament to the role we play in the industry to have leading financial institutions, service providers and IT giants both adopting the framework and providing expertise on its continued development. Our goal is to develop a standardised banking IT architecture on a global scale and continuing to build on our international membership base is a crucial step in achieving this."
Troy Bradley, chief technology officer, FIS said: "We're proud to be part of this impressive consortium that is helping to drive the future of a standards-based IT architecture. In order to more easily provide the capabilities and services that consumers and business users demand, financial institutions must address the complexity of their IT environments and true cross-industry standardization will be a tremendous foot forward in realizing this goal."
Mikhail Kryuchkov, International Business Development Director at Diasoft said "We are excited to be taking an active role in shaping industry standards which will bring numerous benefits to financial institutions globally. BIAN membership will allow us to develop and deliver the most innovative IT-solutions, while anticipating the needs and requirements of the market and our customers".
Michael Leyva VP Global Practice Head Banking and Diversified Financials, Capgemini said: "We are extremely pleased to be joining BIAN. Capgemini has always been committed to adopting standards. We believe BIAN is the future of the foundation for a unified and consistent integration approach for the integration ecosystem across Banking.
"We are also eager to contribute and influence the BIAN assets, where possible. We are firm believers that standardization will allow banks and financial institutions the tools to simplify, rationalize, and improve the systems to enhance both the technology platform and business capabilities. In addition, as we see more and more aging platforms BIAN is critical to building realistic roadmaps that are based on progressive simplification and incremental improvement verses a big bang replacement.
"That said, BIAN will be the nucleus to contribute to help deliver these open technology and business standards in collaboration across service and software providers that the benefit of all financial institutions."