Life of BIAN

Exploring BIAN? Discover how this composable architecture framework can standardise banking operations, foster innovation, and future-proof systems — powered by modern platform engineering principles.

What is BIAN?

The Banking Industry Architecture Network is a collaborative initiative to establish, promote, and provide a common framework for banking interoperability and integration issues. It aims to become a recognised world-class reference point for interoperability in the banking industry.

As a reference architecture for the banking industry, BIAN provides the guidelines for implementing a composable architecture.

This is achieved using self-contained Service Domains; from an implementation perspective, they can be viewed as individual micro-services.

A Service Domain is constrained by a bounded context — everything related to a specific domain is contained within that bounded context. For example, for current accounts, get balances, get fees, process deposits and withdrawals, generate statements, etc, would all be part of this service domain.

Why use BIAN?

Why would a financial institution want to implement BIAN?

There are many different reasons to implement the BIAN framework, including interoperability, standardisation, and agility and innovation.

BIAN is a composable architecture that promotes reuse, and that reuse leads to cost savings and offers the following benefits:

Change or create new service domains
Self-servicing teams focusing on business value

What’s the problem?

All sounds good so far, but BIAN is not a turnkey solution for implementation. While it provides the framework and guidelines, successfully implementing BIAN requires careful planning and adaptation to each organisation’s specific needs. Currently, there are approximately 326 separate service domains identified in the BIAN landscape.

While it’s not expected that any organisation will require all 326 service domains, there’s a high probability that you’ll need close to or above 100.

How do you consistently build across your project teams at speed while maintaining quality?

Repeatability, consistency, and speed

Automate, automate, automate.

In 1908, Henry Ford started mass production of the Model T. In 1913, he combined interchangeable parts with subdivided labour and fluid movement of materials to create his moving assembly line. The resulting productivity gains and price cuts led manufacturers of every type to adopt Ford’s innovative production methods.

DevOps, CICD, Agility and modern development tools are the digital equivalents of those production lines that allow us to implement various levels of automation.

Wrapping all these together under a platform engineering banner benefits organisations by:

Increasing developer productivity
Enabling scalability and flexibility
Improving reliability and stability
Enhancing compliance
Offering collaboration and knowledge sharing

The guts

Platform engineering can take DevOps to the next level, but what are some of the basic tools we’d need to put this all together?

Backstage

We can’t expect multiple teams to create the same code with the same quality. From experience, we know we can’t always expect a single developer to consistently write the same style of code across projects.

Enter Backstage. Taking a templated approach to creating skeleton projects, Backstage is a centralised platform for maintaining a Service Catalogue that fosters documentation and collaboration.

Chris and his team work with our customers to maximise their HR systems, leverage their investments and achieve their strategic HR objectives.

With an extensive track record in the payroll and HR industry, which has included roles at Kmart Australia, EMI Music, The CD Store, and PayGlobal, Chris brings vision and leadership to the executive team. He is focused on launching new generation solutions that improve how payroll and HR management is approached, as technology evolves at a rapid pace.

Harness

Harness enables automation across the entire CD process, including building, testing, and deploying applications. It reduces manual effort and human error, leading to faster and more reliable releases.

Harness incorporates security and compliance best practices into the CD workflow. It includes features like secrets management, access controls, audit logs, and compliance reporting, ensuring that your deployments adhere to security standards and regulations.

LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly enables organisations to adopt a continuous delivery approach by decoupling feature releases from code deployments. Feature flags allow you to control the release of features to specific user segments, enabling gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and canary releases. This empowers teams to continuously experiment and gather user feedback without disrupting the entire user base.

So, what does the future look like?

BIAN is designed to be flexible and adaptable to emerging technologies and industry trends. It provides a foundation for banks to embrace digital transformation, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other disruptive technologies.

By implementing BIAN, banks can future-proof their architecture and ensure compatibility with future advancements in the banking industry.

What’s next, and how do we take it to another level?

Now that you have a foundational understanding of BIAN, the next step is to start with a clear strategy for implementation. You’ll never build the perfect solution on the first attempt; it’s an ongoing, iterative process of continuous improvement. Your platform engineering solution can and should be enhanced over time to meet evolving business needs and emerging technologies.

It's also important to recognise that it's not just about the code. Documentation plays a key role throughout the development process, helping teams maintain clarity on the work being done and ensuring a smooth handover between different stages of implementation. Embrace a "docs-as-code" approach, like Spotify's TechDocs, to continuously document your steps and processes. This ensures that all team members, new and old, have access to the most up-to-date information and can contribute effectively.

Summary

Overall, implementing BIAN offers banks a standardised and modular approach to architecture, leading to cost savings, increased agility, collaboration opportunities, and readiness for future innovations.

However, there is a need to do this in a repeatable manner and apply those same principles to your code.

The good news is scalability, governance, consistency and standardisation can be built into your platform engineering process so new developers and engineers never have to worry about it. If you want to learn more about BIAN, reach out to us at Fusion5.