The BIAN Analytics working group is focused on the analytical systems of banks, which are often characterized by a large number of interfaces from operational systems. By employing an SOA-based analytical environment, banks can reduce the integration costs of their systems and enable software vendors to develop the required products more quickly, flexibly and with less effort.
“Sharing the same vision of evolving an SOA industry standard for the banking industry and its execution, that’s BIAN,” says Martin Schroter, vice president, chief product owner, SAP for Banking, SAP. “Making the vision a reality is SAP’s business: the more results are created jointly with other BIAN members, the more value our co-innovation brings to our customers through solutions that are best-in-class and easy to integrate.”
BIAN aims to simplify implementation of SOA and to strengthen interoperability of software modules between individual software modules. Existing standard technologies and specifications will be used to create a comprehensive framework for specialized semantically defined services for the banking industry. This framework will in turn directly influence software solutions.
“The BIAN membership provides a typical win-win situation for both sides: zeb/ as the originator of the market-transfer-rate approach contributes with the expertise and experience obtained in numerous projects dealing with profitability analysis,” said Herbert Rohlfing, senior manager, zeb/. “zeb/ benefits from the opportunity to influence the development of standard SOA for the analytical systems of financial institutions. The results of the BIAN workgroup based on SOA principles will undergo a continuous evaluation with regard to zeb//control and will be incorporated into the zeb//control product design. Based on the SOA architecture, zeb//control enables fast integration into existing IT architectures.”
Following SOA principles, the BIAN Analytics working group defined the two service operations: Funds Transfer Pricing and Cost Allocations. Both service operations are relevant for the entire lifecycle of a contract, from planning and origination to reporting and event handling — e.g., rollover or unscheduled payments. Typical use cases for profitability analysis services are profitability planning processes, pre-costing and post processing at month’s (period) end.
“BIAN is an important pillar in the syskoplan SOA strategy,” said Dirk Kruse, partner, syskoplan AG. “The network allows us to contribute to industry standards and, at the same time, bring together our service offering in the areas of analytics and SOA for banks. Especially in the area of profitability as a very important topic in the actual market, syskoplan AG is offering state-of-the art solutions that help our customers to respond to changes in this business area in a very flexible and agile way.”
The BIAN working groups distinguish among three specification levels for developing complex functions. The BIAN Analytics working group is responsible for all qualitative and quantitative functions supporting financial accounting and profitability, risk controlling, asset liability management and strategic planning, as well as various internal and external supervisory and steering processes. The working group has already specified the sub-domains on level one and two and identified within the BIAN Service Landscape. These have been approved by the BIAN architecture committee.