Introduction

Objective

This document provides guidance on how the ArchiMate® Specification, a standard of The Open Group, can be used to exploit the value of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) Financial Industry Reference Model (hereafter referred to as the “BIAN Reference Model”).

It is designed to provide a guide to Business Managers, Business Architects, Business Change Managers, CIOs, Enterprise Architects, Solution Architects, IT executives, IT professionals, and all individuals involved or interested in how to manage the transition to a digital financial institution.

It guides an Enterprise Architecture organization to develop an agile, lean, and stable banking architecture using the ArchiMate language and BIAN.

Scope

This document is based on the BIAN Metamodel Specification, Version 7.0, and is accompanied by examples from the BIAN Service Landscape, Version 7.0. This document contains high-level explanatory material. For further details see the BIAN “How-to” Guide.

The BIAN metamodel is currently expressed in Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) class diagrams as an extension of the ISO 20022 metamodel. This document does not contain the specification of the ISO 20022 metamodel, which is available from ISO (See Referenced Documents.).

This document expresses the BIAN metamodel in ArchiMate diagrams.

Overview

After many years of developing and improving the BIAN Reference Model, applying many best practices (and standards), configuring Enterprise Architecture modeling tools, creating BIAN-specific workbenches, and explaining the meaning of BIAN concepts, BIAN architects admitted that the metamodel concepts are not commonly understood and are hard to explain to the banking architects using the BIAN Reference Model. The BIAN Enterprise Architect team decided to express the BIAN concepts in the ArchiMate language, making use of the extension mechanisms of the ArchiMate Specification; i.e., profiles and specializations. In this document only specialization is used. The ArchiMate concepts are specialized whenever BIAN uses a concept that is a specialization of a basic ArchiMate concept. This allows the BIAN content to be much more easily explained by using a common language between Enterprise Architects.

The BIAN Reference Model, expressed in the ArchiMate language, and the ArchiMate language itself is a powerful combination for supporting strategic management in the transformation to a digitalized bank, providing a means of using the BIAN Reference Model with the full set of ArchiMate capabilities. This allows the exchange of BIAN content using tools that support the ArchiMate Model Exchange File Format. Financial institutions, Fintechs[1] and all types of suppliers can exchange BIAN information and information services by using the common ArchiMate modeling language.

Organizing the financial industry operating model based on the BIAN Reference Model combined with the ArchiMate language allows organizations to:

  • Focus on the financial services landscape and capabilities that make the company more competitive and innovative

  • Extend the BIAN Reference Model with all the related architecture elements such as:

    • Active and passive structure elements and behavioral elements available in the ArchiMate language at the different layers: Strategic, Business, Application, Technology, and Physical

    • The motivational elements at all layers

    • The implementation elements

  • Improve the overall performance and efficiency of the use of the BIAN Reference Model to exceed expectations

  • Adopt the BIAN Reference Model with the ArchiMate capabilities to enable a financial institution to create a more mature and professional organization-specific banking architecture

This is realized by implementing a standards-based financial reference architecture allowing an integrated and consistent approach for strategic management, integrating tools from different vendors, supporting (and automating) end-to-end workflows, and providing standard interfaces to collaborate with external service providers while leveraging established best practices.

This document first introduces the BIAN Reference Model from a user perspective.

It then explains the concepts used in BIAN from an architect’s perspective, using the ArchiMate representation.