THE BIG INTERVIEW


IBS Journal February 2018


35


BIAN serious about bank integration in the Open Banking API universe


The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is an independent, member-owned association, established in 2008 to help banks improve their technical architecture. We talked to BIAN’s executive director Hans Tesselaar about its ethos and plans


Senior Editor Bill Boyle


T


he Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is an independent, member-owned, not-for-profit association that was established in 2008 to promote a common


architectural framework for enabling banking interoperability.


BIAN’s goal is to establish a semantic framework to identify and define IT services within the banking industry. The underlying architectural pattern originates from a service-oriented architecture (SOA).


The BIAN community is led by Hans Tesselaar, its executive director, and focuses on creating a standard semantic banking services landscape, while attempting to ensure consistent service definitions, levels of detail and boundaries. As Tesselaar says: “Making changes in an organisation like a bank is very time- consuming and expensive, and there is no guarantee that you will be successful. When we established BIAN in 2008 our goal was to turn banking technology into a plug-and-play environment. Ten years later we haven’t achieved our goals but we are definitely making progress. It is not that easy to accomplish.”


The theory is that this will enable banks to achieve a reduction of integration costs and be able to use the advantages of an SOA to implement commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software.


“We see that there is progress,” says Tesselaar. “In 2008 the idea was that a good SOA was the goal – now it is APIs that are to the fore. The model hasn’t changed but as the developer technology landscape changes, that changes our goals. One of the main drivers is to make banking technology more attractive to the customer, who is now very sophisticated.


“One of the main drivers is to equip the banks to collaborate more


Hans Tesselaar: BIAN has made huge progress since its inception


with fintechs – the very boundaries of the bank have moved. There is a blurring of the boundaries in terms of what is inside the bank and what is outside the bank. Now banks bring fintechs inside the bank and work with cloud providers. That would have been inconceivable ten years ago – so much progress has been made.”


Financial institutions, software vendors and system integrators, along with technology partners, are free to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in defining, building and implementing next-generation banking platforms. The organisation runs many proofs of concepts in collaboration with its members.


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