Temenos Group announced that it is one of the founding members of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN). Led by global tier one banks and industry vendors including among others Temenos, Microsoft, SAP, SunGard and S.W.I.F.T., this independent body will drive the creation of SOA standards for the banking industry.

By building a community that will openly share domain and technical expertise in the application of SOA principles and methodologies, BIAN's principle objective will be to ease the journey of banks moving to a service-oriented architecture.

The BIAN association comprises a broad range of membership including among other: Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, ING, Microsoft, Deutsche Postbank, SAP, Standard Bank, S.W.IF.T., Temenos and Zürcher Kantonalbank. Financial institutions, software vendors and service providers, along with technology partners are invited to join the association to play a collaborative role among other industry leaders towards the definition, building and implementation of next generation banking platforms.

Mark Gunning, Group Strategy Director, Temenos, says: "The creation of BIAN marks a significant milestone for establishing the real and practical standards that are essential if the banking industry is to benefit from the huge potential of service-oriented architectures. We at Temenos have long believed in the benefits of SOA and have been building strong SOA compatibility into our products since 2003. Not only are we contributing to these new standards, but we will ensure that our products support these standards as they evolve."

BIAN members will work closely with standards bodies to encourage the adoption of best practice and compatibility with existing standards. They will also work to ensure enterprise services map closely onto banks' in-house target architectures. By forming this association, BIAN will work within the industry to enable a non-disruptive, step-by-step evolution toward service-oriented architecture - a blueprint that will help banks to more flexibly use software to run core banking processes and to achieve better interoperability between their IT systems. This open forum will offer the widest adoption of industry enterprise services, and will enable banks to easily leverage the results of this collaborative effort. BIAN will define and encourage the development and implementation of standardized services that help banks in their daily operation. This will create operational efficiencies, helping them to focus on growth, time-to-market and the increasing demands from their customers.

Andreas Andreades, CEO, Temenos, adds: "Our involvement with BIAN is part of our company's increasing commitment to SOA. We recognise the importance of SOA and have significantly invested in our product thus far and continue to do so. We invest some 20% of our yearly revenues back into our R&D programme - more than any of our peers and we are well positioned to help our customers align their business to take full advantage of current technology trends and develop a successful, long-term strategy."