FERNBACH and BIAN – a Perfect Match

FERNBACH became a member of BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) in 2008 and has since assumed the position of Chairman in the Lending working group. BIAN’s objective is to help banks implement service-oriented architecture (SOA) and advance the standardisation process.

As an industrial association, BIAN brings together innovative IT companies and international banks to exchange business know-how and experience with the objective of making the results accessible to all.

The financial institutions in the association include Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Postbank, ING, the Standard Bank of South Africa and Zürcher Kantonalbank. The following software companies are also members of BIAN:

• Callataÿ & Wouters
• FERNBACH
• Microsoft
• SAP
• SunGard
• Temenos
• Validata

Effects influencing FlexFinance products, particularly in the lending sector, will also be illustrated.

BIAN's Mission: Standardisation in the Banking Industry

BIAN aims at supporting banks in adapting their IT systems as quickly as possible in order to keep pace with the intensive changes in the sector. Increasing automation is making it necessary to standardise processes across the banking industry, which in turn calls on IT resources to standardise services. BIAN is therefore dedicated to accelerating adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the banking sector and to facilitating the implementation of SOA in financial institutions at reduced cost.

BIAN wants to use existing standard technologies and specifications to set up an extensive framework for specific semantic services in the banking sector.

FERNBACH decided to join the association and to make a real commitment in order to
obtain information on banking trends and IT requirements by communicating with leading banks and be involved in developing a market standard that will be directly incorporated into the further development of FERNBACH’s product standards.

Inside BIAN: Working Approach and Results

The workload in BIAN is spread out among working groups who deal with business topics in detail. Each group has a seat on the so-called ‘Architecture Committee’, which serves as a link between the groups.

The results of the working groups are published in the association’s specifications.

The various working groups use an incremental approach to both analysis and standardisation  to develop the usually complex functionalities. This approach provides for three levels of specifications:

Level 1: A rough structure was set up in the form of sub-domains which were assigned uniquely to the service landscape. Responsibilities were also documented and capabilities and delegations were defined unambiguously.

Level 2: Service operations were defined and their semantics were described in detail. These were broken up into service groups and business objects were also identified. Use cases, which describe application examples were defined.

Level 3: The input and output messages of the operations were clearly described at this semantically complete level. At least the core attributes of each business object were defined for name and type.

FERNBACH’s Role in the BIAN Committee

FERNBACH decided to set the tempo in the ‘Lending’ working group, which was created when FERNBACH became a member of BIAN, and assumed the role of Chairman. Focussing on this area will benefit all stakeholders: BIAN and its members will profit from FERNBACH’s expert knowledge gained from years of experience running projects with the FlexFinance Lending solution. Meanwhile, FERNBACH will be able to make more reliable plans in the face of growing standardisation and internationalisation.

The working group, which started work in November of last year, has announced that the first results will be published this year. This involves the four sub-domains at specification level 1, which were defined in the service landscape.

These range from the loan application processing functionality to complete conclusion of lending agreements:

• Offer Management describes the business services for the loan application process.
• Agreement Management defines the approval process and the division of an application into one or more lending agreements. Amendments to agreements during the lifecycle of a loan are also described.
• Customer Loan Operational Contract Management refers to services that range from a simple change of the payment plan to the complete settlement of a lending agreement.
• Incoming Payment Allocation is a sub-domain that deals with those operations that can be derived from an incoming payment. Some of these are not specific to lending operations.

Because several of the services they address can be used in different business areas of a bank, the Lending working group makes sure to collaborate constantly with other working groups.  

Effect on the FlexFinance Product Range

FERNBACH’s participation in the BIAN standardisation committee has a direct effect on the company’s product development. The product management strategy will now stipulate that all future FlexFinance suite components be structured in accordance with the BIAN service landscape. Since the service landscape is almost a perfect match for the FlexFinance suite component architecture, existing components will be redesigned in planned release cycles and restructured accordingly. The Lending area, with its on-going standardisation, is also leading the way here.

Customer Benefits

FERNBACH’s strategic decision to support the BIAN standard will provide FlexFinance users with a secure foundation for their plans and investment strategies. The components, developed as services, can now be considered as even more semantically stable because they incorporate the interdisciplinary core competences of several providers and banks. Moreover, BIAN’s key objective of achieving interoperability paves the way for easier re-use of functions in heterogeneous system environments. All this is conducive to smooth implementation of SOA throughout a company because the functionality is described in such great detail.