BIAN SIGNS FIRST AFRICAN TECHNOLOGY PARTNER

SCI joins BIAN’s framework to support its financial services clients

The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) today announces its first African technology partner, SCI, a pan-African market leader in technology consulting and solutions with over 50 years experience in servicing the banking and financial sector across the continent. SCI joins BIAN as Africa’s financial services sector sees increasing competition between regional banks on the basis of new technologies and services.

With these new technology trends significantly influencing banks’ infrastructures, Africa’s banking network is currently experiencing a number of challenges, particularly with connectivity and security.  This is specifically due to changes in channel banking, and compliance to standards such as PCI-DSS and SOX. At the same time, to increase productivity and efficiency, more African banks are enabling personal devices to access their networks, which carries an inherent security risk. These changes mean Africa’s banks are seeking more tailored architectural support, which can be expensive and time intensive to deploy. SCI is keen to streamline these customised infrastructures and work to a common standard for the national benefit of Africa’s banking system, reducing banks’ overall CAPEX and OPEX outlays.

BIAN’s standardised framework allows SCI to work with a worldwide network of banking professionals who, together, are using Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) to solve the technology issues facing banks today, wherever they are based.

Hans Tesselaar, executive director, BIAN said: “It is great to broaden BIAN’s reach to Africa. SCI is a technology vendor, meaning it objectively witnesses the technological demands placed on many of Africa’s banks today. In its partnership with BIAN, SCI will introduce SOA standards to many financial institutions, during an important time in the continent’s adoption of innovative technology.

“We are now witnessing a significant global response to our framework, having signed members from India and the Far and Middle East very recently. BIAN will continue to raise awareness of SOA, and its cost advantages, in developing economies, with a view to supporting the adoption of a worldwide banking standard.”

Mr. Mohan Ramaswamy, CEO, SCI Tanzania said: “By actively becoming a member of the BIAN network, we wish to share, learn, contribute and grow, as more innovative technology penetrates Africa’s financial markets. We believe that having open standards, as well as interoperable and risk mitigating answers for financial institutions is critical to the future of banking across the world. Reliability, Availability, Recovery through Predictability and Proactiveness can be an enabler.

“SCI adopts banking industry best practices in its work with its customers and continues with providing more efficient solutions using SOA, thereby enhancing accuracy and faster time to market”

About BIAN

Established in 2008, the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is an independent, member owned, not-for-profit association, designed to build and promote a common architectural framework for banking interoperability issues.  BIAN’s goal is to define SOA and semantic definitions for IT services in the banking industry. The community focuses on creating a standard semantic banking services landscape, while ensuring consistent service definitions, levels of detail and boundaries.  This will help banks to achieve a reduction of integration costs and use the advantages of a service-oriented architecture.

Financial institutions, software vendors, and system integrators, along with technology partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role with other industry leaders in defining, building and implementing next-generation banking platforms.  More information is available at http://bian.org/.