IBS Journal March 2015
‘PNC and financial services companies generally are
not going to run to the cloud.’ Paul Macpherson, PNC
is also a lot of discussion of a bottom-up or top-down approach to transformation. But amidst all of the acronyms and buzz- words, what does this mean in practice within a bank such as PNC? Macpherson believes that in the last
six months the bank’s application of BIAN, in particular, has moved from the theo- retical to a much more practical use. ‘We are coming out of theoretical BIAN.’ As IBS reported at the time, BIAN emerged as an independent membership body in May 2008, having started as the SAP led Indus- try Value Network (IVN), which had been set up three years earlier. So in one form or the other, the participants have been at this for a decade, so you’d hope that it was indeed moving from the theoretical at long last. It has moved slower than envisaged,
not helped by the backdrop of the finan- cial crisis. Some of those who’d been engaged fell away and it seems to have been a hard slog to attract banks. First deliverables, all of which are openly avail- able, came in 2009 and saw the release of documents covering the services land- scape, meta-model definition, services lifecycle management, and service repos- itories and registries, plus business defi- nitions for service lifecycle management, payment agreements, payment execu- tion, clearing and settlement, business partners, business partner agreements, and business partner relationships. The deliverables over the next couple of years seemed, understandably perhaps, to be somewhat patchy, reflecting the particular interests of the more proactive members of BIAN.
IBM finally joined BIAN at the start of
2012 and it was widely assumed that ING Bank had been instrumental in bringing it to the table. It was unclear to what extent, if at all, IBM would share IFW, given the huge amount of investment in this over two decades and the fact that it is a val- uable commercial asset for IBM, mainly used by large banks around the globe. The emphasis has been on IBM and BIAN seek- ing to demonstrate how the IFW and BIAN assets complement each other for banks that are embarking on the type of trans- formation that PNC is seeking. To give an idea of some of the other
current proactive supporters of BIAN, the rest of the board is made up of represent- atives from SAP, IBM, Microsoft, ING (the CIO for commercial banking, Peter van Buuren), UBS and Bangkok Bank. PNC is one of the four or five most engaged banks, says BIAN executive direc- tor, Hans Tesselaar. Each bank has different priorities so, for instance, UBS is particu- larly focused on the financial value chain and how this will evolve, whereas ABN Amro is looking at both its overall strate- gy and areas such as lending, payments and wealth management. For vendors, he says, ‘it is easier to participate because this is more of what they do on a day-to-day basis’. With a bank, there might be a feel- ing, he admits, that ‘this is something you turn to on a Friday afternoon’. Neverthe- less, across the different members, he esti- mates there are currently 150 to 160 active individuals. The BIAN framework is allowing PNC
to work through the future optimum pro- cesses, such as for account opening and
© IBS Intelligence 2015
corporate lending, says Macpherson, and the resultant standardisation will then dovetail into the vendor selection phas- es. The data model allows the bank to do much the same with the data compo- nents. There are no obvious gaps in the BIAN framework, he says, so it maps onto the bulk of PNC’s broad financial servic- es. There is also good depth, he says. He points out that PNC has not, of course, just been a consumer of BIAN work but has been a proactive contributor, through the different sub-groups. BIAN’s current Service Landscape 3.0 is made up of 280 discrete business capa- bilities and 180 standard business scenari- os. BIAN also has a ‘How to Guide’ describ- ing the implementation procedure of the BIAN architecture. In terms of whether PNC’s approach
is ‘bottom up’ or ‘top down’, Macpherson says the bank is doing ‘a bit of both’. The former focuses on starting with the cur- rent legacy systems and trying to compo- nentise these, thereby moving towards SOA without the associated risk and cost of the top down approach and with, potentially, faster returns. The top down approach starts with the design, allows components to be built or bought to support this, with these integrating with the legacy applications as appropriate. A major challenge for both is retaining the integrity of the models within the compo- nents and future infrastructure rather than everything becoming diluted by the real- ity of the more tangible legacy processes and systems. The BIAN framework is ‘pretty much at the middle of everything’, says Macpher-
www.ibsintelligence.com 45
case study: pnc
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