BIAN Banking Architecture - Laleh Rafati
BIAN® (the Banking Industry Architecture Network) is the leading semantic standard for banking architecture. It gives banks and their solution providers a common, technology-agnostic language to define the business functions, services and information of the banking ecosystem — enabling faster software development, easier integration and open APIs.
What is BIAN?
BIAN, the Banking Industry Architecture Network, is an association of banks, solution providers and educational institutions with a shared aim: a semantic service-operation standard for the banking industry. The current version is BIAN 2nd Edition. A standard definition of the business functions, service interactions and information that describe how any bank works benefits the whole ecosystem — a clear alternative to a proliferation of proprietary designs. BIAN takes a capability-oriented approach, which is fundamentally different from the prevailing 'process-centric' designs.
Why organizations use BIAN
What BIAN delivers
BIAN's Reference Architecture for the Financial Services Industry is developed iteratively by its members. Its main deliverables include: the BIAN Metamodel; the BIAN Service Landscape (the high-level reference map); the Service Domains and Service Operations (a MECE — Mutually Exclusive, Commonly Exhaustive — collection of service centres that act as building blocks for a bank's functionality); the BIAN Information Architecture (a MECE collection of Business Objects covering a bank's information needs); the BIAN Semantic API definitions; and Business Scenario and Business Capability definitions. These are supported by the BIAN How-to Guide series, webinars, the BIAN book, and training and certification. The architecture is published in a UML repository, with a free read-only HTML version available on bian.org.
BIAN and TOGAF
BIAN and TOGAF work well together. Think of BIAN as a pool of industry-specific architecture deliverables and TOGAF as the overall framework for architecture work. In a banking environment, BIAN content speeds up TOGAF work and improves its quality, while TOGAF provides a structured approach and a complete set of relevant artifacts that add value to the BIAN deliverables.
Who is BIAN for?
BIAN is aimed at enterprise, business, IT, application, data, system, solutions, process and domain architects, as well as senior managers, project leaders and anyone working within an enterprise-architecture frame of reference. Today BIAN focuses primarily on banking, but other financial services such as insurance and pensions can already benefit — with more models expected for these industries in the years ahead.