SOA in 2011: BIAN Releases SOA-Based Framework to Cut Integration Costs for Banks 
BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network), an international association of banks, vendors and service providers, has released a SOA-based “service landscape” framework to help banks cut integration costs and improve interoperability.
BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network), an international association of banks, vendors and service providers, has released a SOA-based “service landscape” framework to help banks cut integration costs and improve interoperability.
Worldwide, banks are facing the challenge of significantly reducing IT integration costs, said Hans Tesselaar, Program Director at ING Bank and a BIAN member. “As a result, the banking industry is looking for a blueprint from which banks can develop architecture roadmaps that support flexible integration within their existing application landscape as well as with external solutions,” he said.
BIAN’s service landscapes work actually will drive SOA modernization setting the stage for other cutting edge projects for mobile, private cloud and public cloud, Tesselaar said. “Within ING, we have some fifteen years doing SOA but now it is what we call ‘legacy SOA’ because it is difficult to manage and maintain. The BIAN service landscape will help us and other banks modernize their SOA,” he said.
"Customers [can] choose the level of recovery they want, from archiving all the way up to continuous never-fail operations. "
Hans Tesselaar
Program Director
ING Bank & BIAN member
Working with banking and software experts, BIAN’s service landscape aims to create a set of semantic definitions for standard IT services used by banks and financial services firms, Tesselaar added.
“We offer a common language for how banks describe their activities and processes.” he said. The BIAN work is aiming for standardization between the bank back office and different channels, such as application to application, mobile, cloud and others.
To that end, BIAN’s Service Landscape 1.5 defines discrete business and IT capabilities, especially for application-to-application integration unique to the banking sector, he added.
“The BIAN Service Landscape Version 1.5 is a significant step towards a comprehensive reference framework for the banking industry,” Tesselaar said. BIAN’s goal is to define SOA and semantic definitions for IT services in the banking industry, which will help banks to achieve a reduction of integration costs and extract more advantages from SOA projects, he added.
The BIAN service landscapes are not simple templates or WSDL profiles, but are extremely detailed descriptions of how banking operations work. They describe a rich set of 248 “objects” such as a contract agreement across its whole lifecycle. This means BIAN describes the object’s content, flows and other traits that let it be easily used by other domains. “It took us two years to describe a landscape that [architecturally] describes how a bank should look,” Tesselaar told IDN. BIAN is now working on detailed business scenarios and processes for using these objects.
How Banks Will Put BIAN’s Resources, SOA Guidance To Use
At its core, BIAN’s work sets out to make it easier for banks to update applications and launch a new suite of more agile and adaptive applications, Tesselaar said. He shared a typical use case with IDN.
“Often times, you see an application you would like to upgrade, but the integration costs can be three or four times the cost of the application itself, and that extra cost means a solid business case cannot be found. So, the project gets postponed,” he told IDN. “With BIAN’s service landscape as a reference model or a checklist, we can reduce integration costs and banks make a business case for application renewal.”
Aside from its Service Landscape 1.5, BIAN also released a BIAN metamodel and a “How To” implementation guide for banking IT professionals.
The work also has implications for banking in the cloud. “From a BIAN perspective interoperability within the application landscape is a prerequisite for deploying your applications in the cloud,” Tesselaar told IDN. “The BIAN Service Landscape will give banks a blueprint to do so. For banks we see in the near future, due to current legislation, the internal private cloud as the most feasible solution.”
For banks to use cloud effectively, the industry needs “an open and controllable environment [with audit trail] and reliable interfaces or services between the different components,” Tesselaar added. “That is what BIAN Standards will provide. Whether a private, virtual or public cloud, the same issues apply.”
BIAN Metamodel. The banking metamodel is a key part of BIAN’s service landscape work because it will enable easy adoption and on-going interoperability, Tesselaar said. BIAN’s metamodel draws on the ISO 20022 metamodel for its lower level definitions. BIAN is also collaborating with ISO, IFX, OpenGroup and other standards bodies, and incorporates work from these groups, where appropriate.
BIAN’s metamodel states that a “service domain” is an elemental structure – all service domains are “peers,” and cannot include smaller elements. In turn, service domains are assembled into the BIAN Service Landscape to define business areas and nested business domains.
A “service domain” is responsible for the correct execution of its business purpose or role. It has its own internal capabilities and, where needed, can delegate activity to other service domains through the use of services.
BIAN “How-To” Guide. The guide describes how to apply the BIAN Service Landscape to meet banking scenarios, as well as in-depth design techniques, emerging architectural principles and templates. It shows IT architects how to use the service landscapes, usage patterns and other helpful information for adoption and ongoing operations and management.
Use cases include: product launches; mergers and acquisitions; investment planning; application portfolio rationalization and others.
“These deliverables represent a next step in BIAN maturity. Banks can benefit from participation now, given the uniqueness of the BIAN initiative and the delivery of incremental value,” said Gartner’s banking analyst Don Free, in a statement.
BIAN Members include: ACI Worldwide Inc., Axon, Callataÿ & Wouters, Capital Banking Solutions, CGI, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Postbank, FERNBACH, ifb group, IKOR, ING, innobis AG, Microsoft, Rabobank Group, SAP, SunGard, Standard Bank of South Africa, SWIFT, syskoplan, Temenos, Scotiabank Group, Zürcher Kantonalbank
