IBS Journal March 2015


Pittsburgh, home of PNC Financial Services ©dan Chmill, Flickr


son. At present, for instance, PNC is look- ing at its payment engine and had more than 50 requirements from the business. The architecture and business line man- agers then sat down and started to map those requirements against the BIAN framework. This allowed the bank to iden- tify what was truly a requirement and saw the number brought down to single figures. ‘It has allowed us to go to market much quicker than anticipated’ and to then accelerate the refinement of relevant vendors. There are one or two other exam- ples where such advantages can be attrib- uted to the framework, he adds. It is early days in relation to PNC’s core


banking system but Macpherson says, ‘I see huge potential in the BIAN-compliant framework around our core banking’. Here, in particular, he expects that PNC will not end up with a single platform, with com- ponentisation playing an important role. It will be similar with the channels, which he confirms are also covered by the BIAN framework. ‘We have these conversations with all lines of business.’ But can PNC or any other bank hope


to find applications that are in any way ‘BIAN compliant’? Macpherson says his experience relates solely to SAP. ‘They are


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some way down the track looking at how they can amend their operating model.’ Tesselaar points out that a starting point might be to look at those vendors that are acquainted with BIAN to see how far they have progressed. FIS, for instance, has done a proof of concept on how the BIAN landscape will influence its future offerings. In many ways, says Tesselaar, suppli- ers such as these are on a similar journey to the banks. They have lots of systems, of different ages, technologies, strengths and weaknesses, which are akin to the banks’ siloes. It is no surprise that multi-product companies such as FIS are moving towards common components. It is also no sur- prise that this seems to take all of them much longer than planned. FIS is a case in point, having finally started to roll out a couple of components of late after several years of work. CSC is looking to BIAN for a way to modernise its Hogan core banking system, adds Tesselaar. Macpherson confirms that PNC is


actively engaged with its incumbent sys- tem suppliers and could be influenced by BIAN membership when it comes to choosing its future partners. There is also a ‘whole bunch of third party consultants’


© IBS Intelligence 2015 www.ibsintelligence.com


working on the transformation. However, it is the bank’s internal architecture team that is more relevant to BIAN. There are 13 programmes within the five-year trans- formation and then themes that run hori- zontally across them, such as reengineer- ing the data centres, business continuity, security and availability. The next focus will be around agility and time-to-market, Macpherson adds. There is an application rationalisation theme as well and he says that hosted models will ‘absolutely’ have a role to play, although he feels that this won’t be cloud computing in its non- private or at least non-hybrid form. ‘PNC and financial services companies generally are not going to run to the cloud.’ The jury is still out as to whether PNC


can turn all of this into a successful trans- formation, as it is considerably earlier in the journey than some other tier one and tier two banks. However, it is arguably the closest the sector has come to seeing the BIAN theory put into practice at a highly strategic level by a large, broad bank. So long as the bank sticks to its guns, then the true value and challenges of BIAN should become clearer over the next few years at this bank as well as, hopefully, at a number of others that take the same route.


case study: pnc


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