Success Stories

BIAN Transformation projects

Standard Bank – BIAN Transformation Awards 2025 · Winner, Adoption Leader

A Standard Is Worth Its Reach

When Standard Bank Group Technology adopted the BIAN Framework in 2022, the goal was an internal one: a common data model and reusable APIs for the bank’s own integration landscape. Three years on, the initiative has grown far beyond the bank. Standard Bank now acts as a regional catalyst for BIAN adoption across Africa – from hosting the BIAN Member Meetings in Cape Town to leading the extension of the framework into insurance.

This case study describes how one bank’s architecture decision became a continental movement, and what other institutions can learn from it.

Three outcomes stand out. The BIAN Africa Chapter, which grew out of two Member Meetings in Cape Town, now counts 185 members. The BIAN Insurance Product Working Group – five insurers, six banks and South Africa’s insurance data exchange, chaired by Standard Bank – is bringing insurance into the framework. And BIAN-aligned APIs run in production in five markets, carrying cross-border payments for the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System.

“We stopped treating BIAN as our architecture and started treating it as our neighbourhood.” – Paul van der Merwe, Enterprise Architecture & Practices Head, Standard Bank Group

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Play Digital Consulting

Play Digital Consulting wanted to support its customers in modernizing their financial products.

Play Digital Consulting adopted BIAN, alongside Evolve, to give the banks a combination of methodology and standards to support the implementation of any IT decoupling process across the banking sector.

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Union Bank of the Philippines

The Union Bank of the Philippines was dealing with the issues with its quick loans retail loans engine (RLE) service and the overall customer experience.

The project was created from the desire to establish a seamless, fully digital experience that could scale up to meet the country’s huge
demands for loans.

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JP Morgan

JPMC ran a comparison with its proprietary domain model and determined while there is alignment, BIAN has an additional 150 service domains for potential adoption.

As part of the initiative, JPMC is investigating how it can adopt BIAN on several levels, including semantic APIs and the business capability model to build a common abstraction layer which will complement JPMC’s proprietary business domain model.

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Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is working with a South African bank whose strategic aspiration is to become the digital bank of choice across the African continent.

TCS conceptualized, architected, and developed a new highly scalable API and microservices platform using BIAN standards on a cloud-ready Red Hat container platform.

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More Transformation projects

Citi

Citi looked to build and realign existing microservices using an industrystandard framework to facilitate interoperability within and outside the boundaries of the bank and build a high-performance digital store for faster data retrieval.

The project involved the creation of the Digital Integration Hub (DIH), a consistent business service interface based on BIAN specifications and aligned to Citi’s core systems for branded cards, mortgage, and retail bank businesses.

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PNC

PNC developed a data streaming platform which leverages the BIAN framework.

PNC has simplified its digital transformation, reduced the time, cost, and risk to take a capability from idea to implementation, and has become focused on the best experiences for current and future customers.

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Mulesoft

MuleSoft created an accelerator solution to help multiple customers adopt the BIAN model.

The organization helped its banking customers adopt the framework by providing them with API specifications and API templates that are BIAN
compliant.

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Santander

Santander launched a global initiative to promote the business value provided by IT using BIAN as a lever.

Santander used BIAN to define a common framework to define the APIs across the 13 Santander Group entities. This helped the bank to identify synergies across the organization.

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HSBC

HSBC looked to establish common taxonomy because they had no common language between the IT department and the wider business.

HSBC formed five internal working groups to add BIAN as an industry reference framework and design new ways of working, including the business architecture initiative, which referenced BIAN in creating a purposeful and common business capability model.

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Citi

“BIAN provides a standardized and extensive domain service model for Financial Services, so it was easy to pick up and implement the BIAN framework”

Tracy Strong

Chief Operating Officer, Global Wealth Technology

HSBC

“BIAN enables us to deliver better services for our customers, at speed, with scale and at a lower cost”

Aarti Dahiya

Lead Architect, HSBC

JP Morgan Chase

“The BIAN message modeler is a tool which BIAN community member banks can review, compare, and align their APIs to the BIAN Semantic standards to increase the interoperability between banks and technology providers”

Timothy Ness

VP Senior Manager, Digital & Open Banking

MuleSoft

“The BIAN framework will enable banks globally to integrate with external companies and support the move towards Open Banking more easily. We selected BIAN because it is the standardized framework that is most requested by customers”

Eran Agrios

SVP & GM of Financial Services

Play Digital Consulting

“We chose BIAN because of its maturity. With BIAN, we are facilitating and standardizing the way we design products, modernize applications and design APIs”

Francisco Gomez

Director General

PNC

“PNC’s ascension to a national financial power and adoption of BIAN principles go hand in hand. Quite frankly, only an architecture built on the BIAN framework allows an organization of the size of PNC to become and remain a technology leader”

Chris Momberger

Chief of Staff