Banking Industry Architecture Network

Last updated
Banking Industry Architecture Network
Company type Registered association (e.V.)
Industry Banking
Headquarters
Frankfurt
,
Germany
Area served
Worldwide
Website bian.org

The Banking Industry Architecture Network e.V. (BIAN) is an independent, member owned, not-for-profit association to establish and promote a common architectural framework for enabling banking interoperability. It was established in 2008.

Contents

BIAN's goal is to establish a semantic framework to identify and define IT services in the banking industry. The underlying architectural pattern originates from a service-oriented architecture (SOA). [1]

The community focuses on creating a standard semantic banking services landscape, while ensuring consistent service definitions, levels of detail and boundaries. This will enable banks to achieve a reduction of integration costs [2] [3] and use the advantages of a service-oriented architecture of implementing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software.

Financial institutions, software vendors, and system integrators, along with technology partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in defining, building and implementing next-generation banking platforms. [4]

Mission

Banks are facing challenges that will eventually force them to decompose their business and IT landscape into independent but interlinked units [5] and are therefore looking for better means of interaction in their systems.

The banking environment consists of many legacy systems that have, over the years, grown in complexity and become increasingly inflexible. [6]

BIAN is defining a common framework as a base for a shared service-oriented catalogue for the banking industry with the goal of establishing a common language. Based on broad consensus from within the banking industry, this will enable faster, more efficient strategic and operational changes in banks. [7]

To assist and guide the banking industry in achieving an architecture closely aligned with business objectives, leading banks are sharing their requirements for core services with leading software and services vendors to implement these services based on formally defined semantics. BIAN is a global, open, independent and unique community where banks, software providers, and system integrators openly exchange banking IT requirements with regard to interaction and integration. [8]

Strategy

BIAN brings banks, vendors of banking applications, and service providers together as a community to achieve synergies[ buzzword ] by collaborating on a consensus understanding of the requirements for banking enterprise services within an SOA framework and a formal description of a banking services landscape canonical definitions.

Employing an architectural framework to foster proper definition of services, BIAN will help banks and providers move from proprietary to broadly accepted and standardized services. BIAN also represents a repository of non-proprietary knowledge and experience dedicated to supporting the roadmaps for all banks moving towards SOA. [9]

BIAN will offer the industry assistance in:

BIAN standards

The BIAN standards are provided from the BIAN working groups. [11] BIAN working groups collaborate, sharing knowledge and experience around SOA for the banking industry with a current focus on core systems. The working groups focus on defining services within an agreed overall common services landscape.

Service definitions

BIAN is focused on semantic definitions only. Definition of business functional services for retail banking, private banking and corporate banking.

Architecture

In the stream Architecture BIAN defines the appropriate guidelines and methodologies and all the concepts to ensure consistent services:

The BIAN service landscape

The BIAN Service Landscape is a reference framework that categorizes and organizes BIAN Service Domains for ease of access. Different criteria can be used to classify and organize Service Domains that would result in different layouts of the standard set of BIAN Service Domains. BIAN uses a ‘primary’ Service Landscape view based on agreed categorizations that have been refined in use by the BIAN membership.

The BIAN Metamodel is a detailed and comprehensive UML model that defines all the BIAN design structures – it is fully documented elsewhere in its own guide (The BIAN Metamodel). The Metamodel has three elements that capture the design of the BIAN Service Landscape.

  1. Business Area - is the highest-level classification. A business area groups together a broad set of business capabilities. For the BIAN Service Landscape they are defined to be aspects of business activity that have similar supporting application and information-specific needs.
  2. Business Domain – at the next level, business domains define a coherent collection of capabilities within the broader business area. In the BIAN Service Landscape the business domains are associated with skills and knowledge recognizable in the banking business.
  3. Service Domain – is the finest level of partitioning, each defining unique and discrete business capabilities. The Service Domains are the ‘elemental building blocks’ of a service landscape. The Service Domain relates to generic capabilities that do not vary in their scope, but the definitions of the Business Domain and Business Area are classifications that are specific to a particular Service Landscape layout. The Service Landscape layout can be varied depending on use.

Relations with other standards bodies

BIAN is in partnership with independent standards bodies such as Object Management Group (OMG) and The Open Group and IFX Forum. [12] In addition, BIAN has a ‘category D liaison’ with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), for ISO 20022 semantic models. BIAN incorporates when possible the work of these organizations. As an example, the BIAN Metamodel is closely aligned to, and draws on parts of, the ISO20022 Meta Model for many of the detailed definitional aspects. These working partnerships mark a big step forward in BIAN’s commitment to complimentary standards collaboration.

The TOGAF standard and the BIAN standard are mapped to each other. The leverage of the BIAN deliverables in the context of the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM) is further elaborated. For each step in an architecture development process, the integration of BIAN deliverables is described. [13]

BIAN members

Members of BIAN drive the banking industry by understanding the requirements and trends as well as by designing and providing new IT-solutions therefore. The association lives by the participation of its members. BIAN members contribute actively in the association. However the degree of involvement can vary according to multiple aspects. Influencing for the involvement are e.g. the role within BIAN, specific working topics and the current projects within BIAN and the own company.

BIAN Banking Architecture Foundation certificate

BIAN has defined a certification visible at the certification body (Van Haren Certify) The BIAN Banking Architecture Foundation Certification program. Targeted at banking architects. It evaluates their knowledge of BIAN and their capability to implement it in their solutions. [14]

The exam doesn't have a prerequisite and candidates can take it after taking courses or self-study. It is 60 multiple-choice questions in one hour, with a passing score of 70%. The certificate is valid for two years since passing the exam. [15]

Related Research Articles

The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing "open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It has 900+ member organizations and provides a number of services, including strategy, management, innovation and research, standards, certification, and test development. It was established in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meta-Object Facility</span> Standard of Object Management Group

The Meta-Object Facility (MOF) is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard for model-driven engineering. Its purpose is to provide a type system for entities in the CORBA architecture and a set of interfaces through which those types can be created and manipulated. MOF may be used for domain-driven software design and object-oriented modelling.

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is a software design approach for the development of software systems. It provides a set of guidelines for the structuring of specifications, which are expressed as models. Model Driven Architecture is a kind of domain engineering, and supports model-driven engineering of software systems. It was launched by the Object Management Group (OMG) in 2001.

In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products and technologies.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a business function concerned with the structures and behaviours of a business, especially business roles and processes that create and use business data. The international definition according to the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations is "a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a comprehensive approach at all times, for the successful development and execution of strategy. Enterprise architecture applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. These practices utilize the various aspects of an enterprise to identify, motivate, and achieve these changes."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Open Group Architecture Framework</span> Reference model for enterprise architecture

The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is the most used framework for enterprise architecture as of 2020 that provides an approach for designing, planning, implementing, and governing an enterprise information technology architecture. TOGAF is a high-level approach to design. It is typically modeled at four levels: Business, Application, Data, and Technology. It relies heavily on modularization, standardization, and already existing, proven technologies and products.

The ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry (MDR) standard is an international ISO/IEC standard for representing metadata for an organization in a metadata registry. It documents the standardization and registration of metadata to make data understandable and shareable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">System Architect</span> Enterprise architecture tool

Unicom System Architect is an enterprise architecture tool that is used by the business and technology departments of corporations and government agencies to model their business operations and the systems, applications, and databases that support them. System Architect is used to build architectures using various frameworks including TOGAF, ArchiMate, DoDAF, MODAF, NAF and standard method notations such as sysML, UML, BPMN, and relational data modeling. System Architect is developed by UNICOM Systems, a division of UNICOM Global, a United States-based company.

The British Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework (MODAF) was an architecture framework which defined a standardised way of conducting enterprise architecture, originally developed by the UK Ministry of Defence. It has since been replaced with the NATO Architecture Framework.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enterprise architecture framework</span> Frame in which the architecture of a company is defined

An enterprise architecture framework defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models – typically matrices and diagrams – for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business architecture</span> Business discipline

In the business sector, business architecture is a discipline that "represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end‐to‐end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders."

Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) is a publicly available specification from the Object Management Group (OMG). KDM is a common intermediate representation for existing software systems and their operating environments, that defines common metadata required for deep semantic integration of Application Lifecycle Management tools. KDM was designed as the OMG's foundation for software modernization, IT portfolio management and software assurance. KDM uses OMG's Meta-Object Facility to define an XMI interchange format between tools that work with existing software as well as an abstract interface (API) for the next-generation assurance and modernization tools. KDM standardizes existing approaches to knowledge discovery in software engineering artifacts, also known as software mining.

Information Framework (IFW) is an enterprise architecture framework, populated with a comprehensive set of banking-specific business models. It was developed as an alternative to the Zachman Framework by Roger Evernden.

The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a business. SBVR is intended to formalize complex compliance rules, such as operational rules for an enterprise, security policy, standard compliance, or regulatory compliance rules. Such formal vocabularies and rules can be interpreted and used by computer systems. SBVR is an integral part of the OMG's model-driven architecture (MDA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ArchiMate</span> Enterprise architecture modeling language

ArchiMate is an open and independent enterprise architecture modeling language to support the description, analysis and visualization of architecture within and across business domains in an unambiguous way.

Enterprise interoperability is the ability of an enterprise—a company or other large organization—to functionally link activities, such as product design, supply chains, manufacturing, in an efficient and competitive way.

SoaML is an open source specification project from the Object Management Group (OMG), describing a UML profile and metamodel for the modeling and design of services within a service-oriented architecture.

Model Driven Interoperability (MDI) is a methodological framework, which provides a conceptual and technical support to make interoperable enterprises using ontologies and semantic annotations, following model driven development (MDD) principles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enterprise Architect (software)</span> Visual modeling and design tool

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is a visual modeling and design tool based on the OMG UML. The platform supports: the design and construction of software systems; modeling business processes; and modeling industry based domains. It is used by businesses and organizations to not only model the architecture of their systems, but to process the implementation of these models across the full application development life-cycle.

The history of business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. In the next decades business architecture has developed into a discipline of "cross-organizational design of the business as a whole" closely related to enterprise architecture. The concept of business architecture has been proposed as a blueprint of the enterprise, as a business strategy, and also as the representation of a business design.

References

  1. ↑ OpenG SOA. "Open Group SOA Source Book". opengroup.org. OpenGroup. Archived from the original on 2016-08-19. Retrieved 9 July 2014.
  2. ↑ Rosen, Michael, et al. Applied SOA: service-oriented architecture and design strategies. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
  3. ↑ Manoj, Mansukhani. "Service Oriented Architecture Whitepaper" (PDF). HP. Retrieved 9 July 2014.[ permanent dead link ]
  4. ↑ "About BIAN". www.bian.org. BIAN. Retrieved 10 July 2014.
  5. ↑ Skinner, Chris (2014). Digital Bank. Marshall Cavendish C/O Times E, 2014. ISBN   978-9-814-51646-4.
  6. ↑ O´Hara, Christopher. "Improving Product Development Through Core System Replacement". www.banktech.com. Archived from the original on 30 July 2014. Retrieved 10 July 2014.
  7. ↑ Mahmood, Zaigham. "Service Oriented Architecture: Potential Benefits and Challenges" (PDF). WSEAS International Conference on Computers. Retrieved 10 July 2014.
  8. ↑ Christopher, O'Hara. "Improving Product Development Through Core System Replacement". Bank Tech Systems. Archived from the original on 30 July 2014. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  9. ↑ "About BIAN". www.bian.org. BIAN. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  10. ↑ BIAN (July 2014). "Building the future of banking services" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 January 2015. Retrieved 10 July 2014.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. ↑ "BIAN Working Groups". www.bian.org. BIAN. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  12. ↑ "Implementing BIAN Service Domains using the IFX Business Message Specification" (PDF). BIAN & IFX Forum Inc. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 January 2015. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  13. ↑ "Integrating the TOGAF ® Standard with the BIAN Service Landscape" (PDF). www.bian.org. TOGAF & BIAN. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 January 2015. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  14. ↑ "BIAN Training & Certification". bian.org. BIAN. Retrieved 28 November 2021.
  15. ↑ "BIAN Banking Architecture Certification". vanharen.net/standards/bian. Van Haren Group. Retrieved 28 November 2021.
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