Reference architecture is essential in enterprise architecture frameworks, providing a standardized blueprint that aligns technology with business strategies to enhance efficiency and governance. The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) has released version 8.0 of its financial industry reference architecture. This detailed model includes business capabilities, scenarios, service domains, and business objects essential to banking and financial services. The architecture aims to standardize and optimize processes across the industry, offering improved interoperability and efficiency for financial institutions worldwide. In this blog, we give you a case study of the BIAN reference model in ArchiMate.
It stands to reason that such a standard reference model should be expressed in a standard notation, to foster its adoption, and BIAN recognized this need. BIAN version 8.0 has therefore been expressed in the ArchiMate 3 modeling language. The core of the BIAN reference model is its Service Landscape. This consists of discrete non-overlapping building blocks of business capacity that exchange services. A service domain is a building block and is best represented in ArchiMate using the Capability concept. The interactions between the service domains realize the business activities that make a bank a bank. On top of this Service Landscape sits the Capability Landscape, the top level of which is shown below. As you can see, it also uses the ArchiMate Capability concept.
The Service Landscape itself is a deep structure of business areas (Groupings in ArchiMate), consisting of business domains that in turn contain service domains, both modeled as Capabilities. A structure organizing these elements in the form of a value chain is shown below. As you can see, a single picture doesn’t do it justice (and you need a large monitor to view it all), so you can better explore the full structure at the link above.
BIAN and The Open Group, the stewards of the ArchiMate standard, jointly expressed the BIAN model in ArchiMate. The full details of this mapping can be found in the document “ArchiMate® Modeling Notation for the Financial Industry Reference Model: Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN),” published by The Open Group.
To explain the use of BIAN in ArchiMate, The Open Group has published a case study whitepaper, which uses the fictitious but realistic Archi Banking Group as an example. In this blog, we want to give you an impression of what this is about, picking and choosing some of the juiciest bits.
Archi Banking Group is the result of the acquisition of several banks in different countries, as most international banks are nowadays. This has come with the typical challenges of integration and cost control. In particular its fragmented information is becoming a compliance risk and the challenges of ‘open banking’ (e.g. PSD2) are difficult to meet. A high-level assessment of this state of affairs is shown below, using ArchiMate’s Motivation concepts and a Course of Action to express how it intends to deal with requirements on electronic reporting to regulatory authorities.
As stated above, integration is a key concern for Archi Banking Group, in particular in the Payments domain. The eligibility for integration of specific service domains is analyzed by looking at the application functions that support these domains. This is shown with colors in the view below, which also depicts how these service domains relate to the principles, goals and the main driver of Profitability, also central to the previous figure.
Further, into the implementation, solution candidates are mapped to the service domains. The internal contenders are shown below.
Next to these internal alternatives, Archi Banking Group issues an RFP for service providers. Clarity for these external contenders is created by using BIAN’s Common Vocabulary and reference framework and expressing the architecture diagrams in the ArchiMate language. Expressing all alternatives in the same way allows for an equal comparison of their support for Archi Banking’s key requirements, such as straight-through processing (STP), flexible compliance, functionality, interoperability, instant customer position, and, of course, cost.
The case study continues on from here, showing in much more detail how the solution (adapting one of the internal systems) is selected, with technology choices such as the use of a rule management system to perform automated exception handling and compliance rule management, in order to support the STP services. One of the many views of this is shown below, depicting the main applications involved in Payments and the business processes they support.
The case study further details the IT infrastructure needed to support these applications. It also discusses the use of an API layer aligned with BIAN’s API Initiative and the alignment of Payments services with the ISO 20022 standard, one of the other foundational standards that underpin the BIAN reference architecture.
Moreover, it describes how the implementation is planned and executed in several transition phases, encompassing everything from organizational and business process change to technical implementation. All these steps are organized according to the phases of the TOGAF Architecture Development Method.
This blog is much too short to cover everything offered by the BIAN standard and the case study example, but we hope this has given you a foretaste, tempting you to explore further. If you want to know more, please don’t hesitate to book time with one of our consultants.
Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist at Bizzdesign
Marc contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting, and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management.
External consultant at Bizzdesign
Patrick Derde is an experienced Enterprise Architecture Consultant at BiZZdesign. He holds multiple certifications, including BIAN 8.0, COBIT 5, TOGAF 9.2, ArchiMate 3.0, and SFIA 61. With over 20 years of experience in enterprise architecture across various industries, such as financial institutions, retail, government, and utilities, Patrick brings a wealth of knowledge to his role.
