Financial services
SOA help for banks
30 April 2008
SAP and Microsoft, along with a large group of key industry partners, have created the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) to help banks transition to a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
The goal of BIAN is to help banks ease the transition to an SOA by gathering together a community of industry leading players and global banks who will openly share domain and technical expertise to apply SOA principles and methodologies. In employing these principles, banks globally will be able to better respond to changing customer needs and reduce risk and cost of re-engineering legacy systems towards a more flexible operational environment.
“Being an active member of the Industry Value Network of Banks, Credit Suisse sees the creation of this association as significant milestone for not only ourselves, but for the industry as a whole,” said Claus Hagen, Credit Suisse’s head of integration architecture. “The association will create an open environment of members that begins with an idea and takes it all the way through to execution.”
”Microsoft is pleased to play a lead role in helping define the roadmap for a more flexible approach across the banking industry,” said Koen Van den Brande, worldwide industry manager for core banking at Microsoft. “A common view of the functional scope of ‘banking enterprise services’ is needed to build a next generation of agile banking platforms. This SOA-based approach is designed to enable our largest customers to implement more flexible banking solutions based on a new generation of banking technologies from our partners.”
One of the key challenges for SOA in banking lies in the semantic definition of services that will provide a more flexible and modularised IT landscape. In 2005, SAP and its banking advisory board began the journey to address this challenge by creating the industry value network (IVN) group for Banks. The IVN banking group, comprised of 37 financial services institutions and software providers, was tasked with combining their own experiences with expertise from SAP to define important SOA services and create the blueprint for a successful transition from today’s tightly coupled IT landscape.
The IVN group for banks had created an SOA taxonomy, developed a service landscape and identified the strategic and organisational building blocks that banks require for a successful transition to SOA. This successful collaboration has evolved into a global community comprised of 130 participants representing 37 financial services institutions and software providers.