BIAN to Add Wholesale Banking APIs

The Banking Infrastructure Architecture Network (BIAN)—an independent, not-for-profit standards association, is working on introducing application programming interfaces (APIs) catering to wholesale banking and capital markets.

BIAN, which launched its API Exchange at this year’s Sibos conference, has developed 1,500 scenarios that define the processes between different business functions and how they are linked.

The API Exchange currently contains 67 APIs that support banks in building modern processes around customer offers and onboarding, payments, loans, and mobile access. 

The definitions help to reduce the complexity of building and delivering open banking capabilities for banks, and provide guidance on how to implement digital services across both back-end and customer-facing functions.

Hans Tesselaar, executive director at BIAN, tells WatersTechnology that the current APIs available only represent about 20 percent of what is being developed. 

“We are defining all those business functions and we also needed to know the relationship between those business functions—what is the information that flows from one business function to the other business function? We asked our bank members to provide these process definitions and then we translated those process definitions into what we call a scenario,” he says. 

The 1,500 scenarios that BIAN has includes wholesale banking but perhaps at a level of detail that is lower than those it has established for retail banking at the moment, he adds. 

“The business thinks more in terms of brokerage, position keeping, and investment ordering, and so on. That’s what you call business capabilities. We are now putting on top of our model a business capability layer that links into these so it makes it easier for business owners to say ‘I am responsible for, for example, discretionary portfolio management, and to see the things I have done and to know what are the systems underneath that support that,’” he adds. 

He says, “We have corporate finance, institutional wealth management, trade finance management, investment banking… it is focusing on the enterprise level. We also have the additional layer of these functions and we are making it one level deeper and connecting them.”

Tesselaar says BIAN will adjust its priority on new APIs to release based on the demand and feedback of its members and the community. “We have a draft [of what we will add next] but we’ll see what the industry demands for. I see that in Sibos there is a lot of demand and interest for wholesale banking APIs from banks and vendors,” he says.

Banks, software vendors and fintech companies can access definitions from the API Exchange for free, by registering with BIAN online. All APIs have been created using BIAN-established data models and in accordance with the ISO 20022 global standardization approach. This ensures they can be integrated across all major technology platforms used by banks. The BIAN API Exchange is currently hosted on Azure, Microsoft’s enterprise-grade cloud computing platform.

More than 35 developers across the BIAN member network were involved in creating the API Exchange, including PNC, Microsoft, Citi, JP Morgan Chase, IBM and Virtusa.

“The idea is that we hope by the end of next year we will have everything out. We did about 20 percent in less than a quarter so if we can accelerate that, then 100 percent will be somewhere by the end of next year,” he says.