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SAP and Microsoft Join Together to Help Banks Establish a SOA for their Business Operations

Published: April 30, 2008

The goal of BIAN is to help banks ease the transition to an SOA by gathering together a community of industry leading players and global banks who will openly share domain and technical expertise to apply SOA principles and methodologies.

SAP AG, together with Microsoft, recently announced a significant milestone in its mission to help banks establish a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for their business operations. SAP and Microsoft, along with other founding members, have created the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN). The goal of BIAN is to help banks ease the transition to an SOA by gathering together a community of industry leading players and global banks who 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 towards a more flexible operational environment. 

While IT infrastructure is seen as a key component to a bank's operations, outdated and incompatible legacy systems are increasingly becoming a hindrance in tightly linked, global financial markets. As an association, BIAN members will work within the industry to enable a non-disruptive, step-by-step evolution toward SOA. It will work to create a blueprint to help banks more flexibly use software to run core banking processes and achieve better interoperability among their IT systems allowing them to reduce risk and costs while improving overall operations. The open forum will offer a wide adoption of industry enterprise services and will globally enable banks to easily utilize the results of this collaborative effort.

"Being an active member of the Industry Value Network of Banks, Credit Suisse sees the creation of this association as significant milestone for not only ourselves, but for the industry as a whole," said Claus Hagen, head of Integration Architecture, Credit Suisse."The association will create an open environment of members that begins with an idea and takes it all the way through to execution."