Member Quotes

“Increasing agility and reducing costs are priorities for ABN AMRO and we expect to achieve significant reductions in integration costs through our BIAN membership. BIAN’s proposition not only defines the banking services landscape, but provides practical implementation guidance shaped by leading industry technology vendors.”

Henk Houtzager
Head of Strategy, Innovation & Architecture
ABN AMRO

“We are delighted to be joining the BIAN community and to align our products and methods to a global standard which is the result of bank and industry partnership. We firmly believe that financial services organisations will benefit from the interoperability and clarity that BIAN is bringing to the industry, and we are glad to contribute our ideas and expertise to help achieve this goal.”

Kris Hansen
Vice President, Architecture and Management Consulting
Axxiome

“Banco Galicia was the first Argentine bank to offer mobile payments and an internet portal to its customers – we adopt revolutionary technology, to enhance our customers’ banking experiences. We recognise this pioneering trait in BIAN through its pursuit of global SOA banking standards. Using BIAN’s SOA standards will speed up the time-to-market for new products from Banco Galicia, keeping us at the top of our game with regards to customer service and retention.”

Eduardo Agra
Chief Information Officer
Banco Galicia

“The bank adopted a service-oriented architecture over 15 years ago with the objectives of improved agility, reduced cost and improved consistency. In the past five years, we have implemented newer technologies based on web services to expand and update the infrastructure supporting our SOA. We view standardisation across the industry – amongst both financial institutions and vendors – as the key to realising the promise of SOA and simplifying the integration effort of major projects. We are impressed with BIAN’s existing membership and are delighted to be part of this visionary organisation. We hope this forum will provide real business value in the years ahead.”

Ian Guy Gillard
Executive Vice President
Bangkok Bank

“Modern banking is all about service, and services today depend on highly flexible IT structures that are able to shift to meet industry needs as they occur. Achieving this would be exceedingly difficult and impractical without SOA, and BIAN is doing essential work in this area. Therefore, we made the decision to join BIAN.”

Michel Tueni
General Manager
Capital Banking Solutions

“By joining BIAN we are actively participating in the creation of new IT standards that we will be able to leverage as we plan for the future.”

Tim Whiteley
Executive General Manager Enterprise Service Development
Commonwealth Bank of Australia

“The success of core IT transformations in the context of mergers, major renewals or outsourcing projects crucially depends on overcoming barriers to effective communication, both on a technical and even more important on a semantic level. BIAN with its meta-model, banking IT reference landscape and service definitions is about to shape a common banking IT language, which will facilitate communication across companies. Based on collective experience, expertise and a common understanding of leading financial industry companies, BIAN clearly has the potential to provide a lingua franca for banking IT, which has been sorely missed.”

Alexander Umek
Transformation Director
COREtransform

“Being an active member of the BIAN, Credit Suisse sees the creation of this association as significant milestone for not only ourselves, but for the industry as a whole. The association will create an open environment of members that begins with an idea and takes it all the way through to execution.”

Claus Hagen
Head of Integration Architecture
Credit Suisse

“I am absolutely convinced that cost pressures and banking regulation will lead to stronger convergence in business, operations and IT. To stay competitive in the long run, banks need to leverage investment in core banking infrastructure with peers and embrace open standards – ‘coopetition’. BIAN is building these standards for easier software selection and far less costly integration. Treating core banking infrastructure as a commodity will allow us to put more emphasis on innovation and areas where IT can bring competitive advantage.”

Christian Gosch
Group CIO
Erste Group

“Fernbach Software has fully supported BIAN since October 2008, and adheres to the need to accelerate the adoption of Service Orientated Architecture in the banking industry. Fernbach and BIAN seek to improve the fundamental basics of business applications and to encourage the restructuring of IT architectures to enhance interoperability between banks. The ability to reduce costs while mitigating risk and ensuring transparency is a key objective of FERNBACH SOFTWARE and BIAN.”

Jürgen Späder
Chief Technology Officer
FERNBACH

“Open standards create interoperability and accelerate the adoption of new technologies that help industries work more intelligently. BIAN’s collaboration with industry groups such as Object Management Group (OMG) and SWIFT demonstrates its commitment to making its banking models more valuable to its members. Through the BIAN community, IBM will continue working to address the requirements of financial institutions through solutions based on open standards.”

Chae An
Vice President, Financial Services Solutions
IBM

“We want BIAN to have success in the short-term. The principle of the community is based on the contribution of several members. Hence, we drive those topics actively that we are experts in. For a consulting company such as ifb group the opportunity to contribute to the synthesis of banks’ different approaches is very valuable and enables us to deliver what our customers need.”

Dr. Rainer Merkt
Partner
ifb group

“As a service provider we are highly interested in the future solutions of our customers. We consider BIAN as the platform to place the current needs and problems of our customers and to experience from the BIAN members so that we can participate on the future design of the banking software.”

Heiko Stransky
Head of Technology
IKOR Financials

“In large organizations, integration costs make or break the business case in building and implementing new applications. The cost level is determined by the degree of standardization of interfaces, from a technical and a definition point of view. While it is becoming more and more clear that SOA is the best technology for internal (today) and external (soon) interfaces, standards will have to be agreed upon at industry level. That is why BIAN, and the facilitation it provides for banks and software vendors is so important to us.”

Steve Van Wyk
Chief Information Officer ING Bank & Head of Operations and Information Technology
ING

“We believe that sharing the BIAN idea of standardized borders between the IT business domains of a bank will help our customers to integrate standardized software components more easily and less costly into their existing system landscapes. We therefore are actively engaged in developing this landscape within the Service Landscape working group.”

Arne Schultz
Head of competence center service orientated architecture
innobis AG

“Microsoft is committed to lowering the cost of ownership and providing a more flexible and innovative platform for banking. 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.”

David Vander
General Manager of Services APAC
Microsoft

“Postbank places high emphasis on using standardized, purchasable software. We are optimistic that BIAN as a joint effort of banking industry companies will lead to the creation of a broadly accepted banking industry standard which defines the borderlines of banking IT components as well as the services mediating the communication between them. On the long term, we expect the implementation of this standard to massively improve the interoperability of products from different vendors as well as the sustainability of our own, standard-aligned, applications.”

Dr. Thomas Mangel
Member of the Board
Postbank

“Lowering integration costs, minimizing IT risk, thus allowing banks to focus on their strategic priorities through IT industry standards is important to us. Our company is based on cooperative principles, we believe in collaboration. With BIAN we aim to stimulate international standards from which all can benefit.”

René Steenvoorden
Chief Information Officer
Rabobank

“SAB pays particular attention to the development of joint projects with its clients in the banking sector and its partners. We are used to collaboration with clients through the SAB Users Club, a dynamic autonomous organisation. The BIAN deliverables can be seen as a ‘common language’ for all these joint projects and we expect that SOA components, common services and processes will bring significant gains – in both time and costs – to our clients and to SAB.”

Jean-Loup Joly
Head of Partnerships
SAB

“We are committed to BIAN, because this work is of high value and importance in the transition of the industry. Our engagement is shown by the involvement in many working groups as well by the support of the organisation.”

Martin Schroter
Senior Vice President, Banking, Application Strategic Innovation
SAP AG

“Scotiabank is excited to be joining BIAN, and actively participating in the creation of new IT standards that we will be able to use as we plan for the future.”

Martine Lamoureux
VP Core Banking Technology at Scotiabank
Scotiabank

“SMU is the first university in the world to join the BIAN network and we look forward to the collaboration to build a ‘teaching bank’ from the ground up, using current and emerging architectural best practices. Our teaching bank’s service-oriented architecture is guided by the BIAN Service Landscape, which we recognise as the emerging banking industry standard model for SOA. SMU Teaching Bank is a platform for collaboration with banks and vendors to create and test new ideas for banking systems and processes. We will work with the industry and BIAN community to trial and test change scenarios, such as a core banking system replacement, or a bank merger whereby multiple banking systems need to be integrated to coexist.”

Steven Miller
Vice Provost (Research) and Dean of the School of Information Systems
Singapore Management University

“Sopra Banking Software fully supports BIAN as both organizations continue to grow from strength to strength. Together Sopra Banking Software and BIAN are fully focused on the need to promote industry standards and SOA. Sopra Banking Software strives to share our best-practices and in-depth financial services expertise with our peers within BIAN to ensure a more transparent and cost effective banking environment.”

Renaud Winand
Head of Product Department
Sopra Banking Software

“Two factors are forcing banks and their suppliers to do a better job by creating clear standards: the credit crunch and globalisation. Every time a bank acts in isolation and recreates a process which is common across the majority of banks, it is wasting its time, probably creating a less efficient customer process than it could, and ignoring the wisdom of others. Every time a software vendor turns these common processes into proprietary code and claims uniqueness, the banking industry is less well off than it could be. BIAN is the place where banks and software vendors learn, discuss and ultimately disseminate best-process practices. SunGard is a founding member of BIAN because we believe that open-processes are beneficial to banks, their customers, and software vendors.”

Mats Lillienberg
Chief Technology Officer
Sungard

“SWIFT’s mission is to drive efficiencies in the financial industry by enabling automation. To achieve this, SWIFT’s standardization efforts focus on the content and usage of messages exchanged between institutions. Because BIAN’s interest is in standardizing the IT landscape within institutions, BIAN is fully aligned with SWIFT’s goal of increasing efficiency, but complementary in its approach. SWIFT supports and contributes to BIAN to ensure that BIAN and SWIFT/ISO standards work well together and deliver maximum efficiency benefits for the industry.”

Patrik Neutjens
Head of Partner Management
SWIFT

“We are pleased to be joining BIAN. TCS has always been committed to adopting standards and influencing them where possible. We believe BIAN offers the potential for further standardisation and gives banks the tools to rationalise and simplify their businesses. We see BIAN as a vehicle to contribute to help deliver these open business standards in a collaborative manner, for the benefit of all financial institutions.”

R. Vivekanand
Vice President & Global Head – Product Delivery
TCS Financial Solutions

“Our clients want software that adheres to integration standards so they can reduce cost and risk while at the same time increasing the agility of their IT infrastructure.”

Koen Van den Brande
Group Strategy and Marketing Director
Temenos

“Being a member of BIAN is an important step towards the development and the definition of standards useful to unify the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) landscape in the Banking Industry and to make integrations easier with attention to the costs. In this way, UniCredit can align its assets to industry standards, specifically for commoditized banking functions, and take advantage in being part of this international network by taking part to the specific working groups.”

Patrizia Iacovone
Head of ICT Strategy at UniCredit
UniCredit Group