The banking industry is facing major challenges today – global consolidation, cross-border mergers, the break up of the value chain, and new regulatory requirements. One of the prerequisites for successfully managing these challenges is a flexible and agile IT environment.

Blueprint for Greater Adaptability

Using a business-driven approach to service-oriented architecture (SOA), you can introduce a new level of flexibility and adaptability into your business systems – step-by-step. SOA provides services and functionality that can be readily assembled and rearranged to enable new processes and provide innovative business solutions.

SAP delivers SOA through our business process platform for banking – an SOA-enabled business functionality from SAP and ISV partners – to support core industry processes. Because business functionality is linked and process-enabled within the platform, you get both:

• Conventional advantages of standardized, packaged software, including out-of-the-box capability and high performance, scalability, and resilience
• The promise of SOA: re-combination and reuse of services and business functionality, software upgrade paths, and the flexibility to adapt to business needs

The bottom line: You get all the advantages of standard packages from SAP and ISV partners without the inflexibility or cost typically associated with ongoing change.

Banks Collaborate with SAP on SOA Initiative

CIOs and IT architects from major stakeholders in the financial services industry have collaborated with SAP – through our Industry Value Network group for banks – to shape the future of industry SOAs that will power the next generation performers. Launched in November 2005, the group engaged leading banks throughout the world, including ABN Amro, Absa, Banca Intesa, Barclays, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), Credit Suisse, Deutsche Postbank, ING, Nordea, and Standard Bank, with the goal of accelerating the transition from traditional to service-oriented architectures.

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

The Industry Value Network group collaboration has evolved in 2007 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 an SOA with a meta model, a service landscape, and a business object model. Additionally, several building blocks have been described.

The Industry Value Network group for banks 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 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.