Microsoft Announces First Major Milestone in the Banking Industry Architecture Network Alliance

REDMOND, Washington -

- Industry technology leaders help banks evolve to a standard information technology infrastructure for greater organizational flexibility, interoperability, cost control and risk mitigation in today’s turbulent marketplace.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) alliance has published the first major banking industry information technology (IT) services standards to its members and the banking community at large.

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BIAN’s mission is to enable faster strategic and operational changes of the banking business by providing systematically defined banking functional IT services based on a broad consensus in the banking industry. It achieves this via an open and transparent model leveraging its 23 bank and technology members.

The six standards published today represent a major milestone in BIAN’s efforts to help banks evolve a standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) to accelerate return on investment (ROI) from their IT investments. The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 (WPC09) held in New Orleans July 13-16, 2009.

“The implementation of an SOA is an important goal for banks, and almost every bank is well under way in its efforts to evolve to an SOA,” said Oliver Kling, secretary general for BIAN. “The BIAN initiative consequently represents a real opportunity for banks to accelerate replacement of inflexible legacy environments, create IT and ultimately business agility, and reduce integration costs without simply slashing costs. BIAN promotes interoperability among banking services and application providers by the definition and adoption of semantic industry standards. By working with BIAN, banks now will be able to leverage the world’s best practices.”

“Microsoft is committed to lowering the cost of ownership and providing a more flexible and innovative platform for banking,” said Susan Hauser, vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft. “In addition, we consider an open standards-based environment critical to our success. As a founding and active member of BIAN, Microsoft is enabling global collaboration with key thought leaders in the banking and IT communities around the establishment of technology standards and SOA best practices. In doing so, BIAN will be instrumental in laying the groundwork for the banking industry services in the new economy.”

Other vendor commitments to BIAN and SOA are also being realized. As another founding member of the network, Temenos launched the latest release of its T24 product in May, signifying the first formal release of a set of model bank banking services, which have been aligned with the work being done through BIAN on the banking services landscape.

“Temenos fully supports BIAN’s goal of easing the journey of banks moving to a service-oriented architecture,” said Koen Van den Brande, group strategy and marketing director for Temenos, commenting on the role it has played so far. “We recognize the importance of SOA and have heavily invested in our product, and continue to do so, to ensure it is fully SOA compliant. We are actively undertaking development to ensure our products are aligned with BIAN standards and are fully confident this will further our ability to support larger retail banking clients that are implementing SOA. We look forward to collaborating with the BIAN membership network further as we work toward achieving what the industry needs: increased agility with reduced cost and risk through standards-based integration, available on leading core banking platforms.”

The following standards documents are about to be published: Service Landscape, Metamodel, Service Repository, Service Lifecycle Management, Payment Agreement, Payment Execution, Clearing, and Settlement.

Major banks and banking industry information systems vendors already have committed to implementing the Metamodel and Service Landscape standards, and the banking industry at large is expected to adopt these and the other BIAN standards as the demonstrable value of BIAN is better understood and its membership grows.

The delivery of these standards will help the banking industry address the key market imperative to drive cost reductions through greater efficiencies and organizational flexibility in order to adapt successfully to a rapidly changing business environment. To survive and succeed in today’s volatile marketplace, banks need increasing agility in their application landscape and IT infrastructure to reduce the time and cost to integrate strategic capabilities into their offerings. Leveraging BIAN standards will enable banks to become more efficient via streamlined integration of systems and processes, as well as set the foundation for a more flexible information systems architecture.

According to Robert Hunt, senior research director at TowerGroup, ” BIAN represents an opportunity for banks and vendors to develop a standardized approach for migration to a services-oriented architecture. TowerGroup believes that banks can realize significant benefits from both the adoption of banking-industry-specific standards and the creation of best practices for implementing SOA.”

About BIAN

Created in 2008 by SAP AG and Microsoft, along with other founding members, BIAN is a global, open, independent and unique community defining SOA and semantic definitions for IT services in banks for the long term according to a standardized industry model.

BIAN’s goal is to help banks ease the transition to an SOA by gathering together a community of industry-leading players and global banks that will openly share domain and technical expertise to apply SOA principles and methodologies. In employing these principles, banks globally will be able to better respond to changing customer needs and reduce risk and cost of re-engineering legacy systems toward a more flexible operational environment.

By defining and encouraging the development and implementation of standardized services, BIAN will help banks in their daily operations by creating operational efficiencies and allowing them to focus on growth, time-to-market and the increasing demands from their customers. Financial institutions, software vendors and service providers, along with technology partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in the definition, building and implementation of next-generation banking platforms.

About Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference

Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference provides Microsoft’s partner community with access to key marketing and business strategies, leadership, and information regarding specific customer solutions designed to help partners succeed in the marketplace. Along with informative learning opportunities covering sales, marketing, services and technology, the Worldwide Partner Conference is an ideal setting for partners to garner valuable knowledge from their peers and from Microsoft. More information can be found at www.microsoft.com/partner/events/wwpartnerconference and on the Partner Program home page at https://partner.microsoft.com.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Source: Microsoft Corp.

Wendy Grover of Microsoft, +1-425-705-7609, wegrover at microsoft.com; or Chanda Gathani, +44-203-100-3605, chanda.gathani at metia.com / NOTE TO EDITORS: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at https://www.microsoft.com/presspass on Microsoft’s corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.mspx. /LOGO: https://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO