Global consolidation, cross-border mergers, and new regulatory requirements are just some of the major changes impacting the banking industry. A prerequisite for successfully managing these challenges is a flexible IT environment.

CIOs and IT architecture experts from leading banks and other major financial institutions, along with independent software vendors, systems integrators, and SAP, joined with leading banking institutions in a collaborative pilot effort to shape the future of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) in the banking industry. This joint effort – know as the Industry Value Network group for banks – was launched in September 2005. The goal of the group was to:

• Accelerate the transition from traditional IT architectures to SOA architectures
• Deliver solutions that enable banks to differentiate themselves from their competitors and innovate in order to meet their customers' needs

The group focused on defining enterprise services for the following areas:

• Sales and service
• Operations and execution
• Analytics
• Cross-process reference data

Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) Emerges from the Industry Value Network for Group Banks

During 2007, the Industry Value Network group collaboration evolved into a global community comprised of 130 participants representing 36 financial institutions, software and service providers, and technology vendors. It has identified more than 180 important services and defined 70 of those services in detail. In addition, it has created a first version of a service-oriented architecture with a meta model, a service landscape, and a business object model. It has also described several building blocks.

The group decided to move its activities into a large, visibly independent global organization to ensure that the organization structure facilitates the creation of banking industry standards. The goal of the newly established organization – the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) – is to enable faster strategic and operational changes of the banking business by providing systematically defined banking IT services based on a broad consensus in the banking industry.