CBA to share secrets of its crown jewels

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has joined an information sharing alliance of major banks and system vendors that aim to standardise banking technology and ease integration pains. 

CBA became the first bank from the Asia Pacific to join the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), which consists of 11 banking members, including Credit Suisse, ING and Deutsche Bank.

BIAN members shared a “vision about the interoperable architectures in banking and a common understanding regarding the strategic evolution of core banking systems,” said Karin Fischenbeck, Secretary General of BIAN.

The network was established in 2008 with the vision that it would help banks transition to services oriented architectures (SOA) by allowing members and core system vendors to share information. 

“The CBA will contribute knowledge gained through our banking transformation programs and hopes to learn about experiences from other members to further increase the interoperability in our systems,” said Tim Whiteley, CBA’s executive general manager of enterprise service development.

Other BIAN vendors included SunGuard, SWIFT and Temenos, but notably not Oracle or IBM. BIAN grew out of the Industry Value Network created by SAP in 2005.   

CBA’s contribution was expected to accelerate standards in the banking ecosystem, according to BIAN. 

The alliance's first set of published standards came in 2009, and covered service landscape, metamodel, service repository, service lifecycle management, payment agreement, payment execution, clearing, and settlement.