USA: SAP AG, together with Microsoft Corp., recently announced a significant milestone in its mission to help banks establish a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for their business operations. SAP and Microsoft, along with other founding members, have created the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN).

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 that 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 toward a more flexible operational environment.

Based on the foundation of the Industry Value Network (IVN) for Banks created by SAP, 17 founding members have launched BIAN: AXON, Callataÿ & Wouters, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Finanz IT, ifb Group, ING, Microsoft, Deutsche Postbank, SAP, Standard Bank, Steria, SunGard, S.W.I.F.T, Syskoplan, Temenos and Zürcher Kantonalbank. The announcement was made at a signing ceremony, where members gathered for the official launch of the BIAN association.

While IT infrastructure is seen as a key component to a bank’s operations, outdated and incompatible legacy systems are increasingly becoming a hindrance in tightly linked, global financial markets. As an association, BIAN members will work within the industry to enable a non-disruptive, step-by-step evolution toward SOA.

It will work to create a blueprint to help banks more flexibly use software to run core banking processes and achieve better interoperability among their IT systems, allowing them to reduce risk and costs while improving overall operations. The open forum will offer a wide adoption of industry enterprise services and will globally enable banks to easily utilize the results of this collaborative effort.

A goal of BIAN is to define and encourage the development and implementation of standardized services, which will help banks in their daily operations by creating operational efficiencies and allowing them to focus on growth, time-to-market and the increasing demands from their customers. Financial institutions, software vendors and service providers, along with technology partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in the definition, building and implementation of next-generation banking platforms.