The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN)

BIAN is a not-for-profit organization with over 70 members worldwide. It was founded in 2008 by (amongst others): SAP®, Microsoft®, ING, IBM®, and Credit Suisse.

BIAN is an association of banks, solution providers, and educational institutions with the shared aim of defining a semantic service operation standard for the banking industry. The expectation of BIAN is that a standard definition of the business functions and service interactions that describe the general internal workings of any bank will be of significant benefit to the industry. When compared to a proliferation of proprietary designs, such an industry standard provides the following main benefits:

  • It enables the more efficient and effective development and integration of software solutions for banks

  • It improves the operational efficiency within banks and provides the opportunity for greater solution and capability re-use within and among banks

  • It supports the adoption of more flexible business service sourcing models, and enhances the evolution and adoption of shared third-party business services

BIAN refers to the collection of designs that make up its industry standard as the BIAN Service Landscape. The development of the BIAN Service Landscape is iterative, relying on the active contribution of industry participants to build consensus and encourage adoption. BIAN coordinates the evolution of the BIAN Service Landscape on behalf of its membership with regular version releases to the industry, and seeks feedback to help continually expand and refine its content.

In the architecture continuum, the BIAN Reference Model aspires to provide the industry architecture for the financial industry. It aspires to provide a common architecture language within a financial institution and between financial institutions, their partners, and suppliers.

Years of effort have been invested in developing and improving the BIAN Reference Model. The BIAN Reference Model and its metamodel have been documented in a BIAN-specific notation and workbench.

In order to make the knowledge transfer to banking architects using the BIAN Reference Model easier, the BIAN Enterprise Architect team decided to switch to the ArchiMate language. This allows the BIAN content to be much more easily explained by using a common language between Enterprise Architects.

The BIAN concepts are expressed making use of the extension mechanisms of the ArchiMate Specification; i.e., profiles and specializations. In this document only specialization is explained. The ArchiMate concepts are specialized whenever BIAN is using a concept that is a specialization of a basic ArchiMate concept.

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, and all types of partners and suppliers can exchange BIAN information and information services by using the common ArchiMate modeling language.

Developing an organization-specific operating model based on the BIAN Reference Model allows organizations to focus on the financial services landscape and capabilities that make the company more competitive and innovative.

Using the ArchiMate language enables organizations to extend the BIAN Reference Model with all its related organization-specific architecture elements, such as:

  • The core architecture elements (active and passive structure elements, and behavioral elements) available in the ArchiMate Specification at the different layers: Strategic, Business, Application, Technology, and Physical

  • The motivational elements at all layers

  • The implementation elements

Adoption of the BIAN Reference Model in combination with the capabilities of the ArchiMate language enables 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.