Microsoft Contributes to Pushing Banks to a Service-Oriented Architecture

Microsoft, one of the founding members of the Banking Industry Architecture Network Alliance, indicated that the banking community could access the first major banking industry information technology (IT) services standards as of July 13th, 2009. At the start of this week, the Redmond company expected the following standards documents to be published: Service Landscape, Metamodel, Service Repository, Service Lifecycle Management, Payment Agreement, Payment Execution, Clearing, and Settlement. According to the software giant, heavyweight members of the banking industry are already on their way to implementing the Metamodel and Service Landscape standards.

“The implementation of an SOA is an important goal for banks, and almost every bank is well under way in its efforts to evolve to an SOA,” explained Oliver Kling, secretary general for BIAN. “The BIAN initiative consequently represents a real opportunity for banks to accelerate replacement of inflexible legacy environments, create IT and ultimately business agility, and reduce integration costs without simply slashing costs. BIAN promotes interoperability among banking services and application providers by the definition and adoption of semantic industry standards. By working with BIAN, banks now will be able to leverage the world’s best practices.”

Microsoft indicated that it expected additional banks to start adopting the new BIAN standards. In the end, the uptake of the new standards will be synonymous with higher profits, the company noted. In this regard, the focus of standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) is to drive an accelerated return on investment (ROI) as far as IT investments go.

“Microsoft is committed to lowering the cost of ownership and providing a more flexible and innovative platform for banking,” said Susan Hauser, vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft. “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.”