OREANDA-NEWS. October 15, 2015. Oracle today announced its membership of standards organizations IFX Forum and BIAN. Oracle has been a leader in the creation and support of open standards to enable systems and technology to work together, providing both efficiency and choice to our customers. These new memberships extend Oracle’s commitment and contributions to international and national standards.

Banks are grappling with modernizing their IT environments. Cloud adoption, the deployment of digital capabilities, and standards adoption can help them meet these challenges. Standards adoption provides a foundation for strategic enterprise architecture planning and application integration, both of which are critical in increasing bank agility.

IFX Forum and BIAN are two complementary industry-leading standards development organizations addressing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in financial services.  BIAN and IFX frameworks are technology-neutral; when used together they can provide a powerful, standardized, interoperable solution for financial institutions. Both organizations believe that leveraging their standards together can positively impact in the banking industry and can bring mutual benefits to both organizations, now or in the future.  The philosophies underpinning the BIAN and IFX standards closely align with Oracle's approach to unlocking value through collaboration across both standards and solutions.

“Oracle is committed to the use of open banking and payment standards. In joining IFX and BIAN we are building on our participation in the development of other international and national standards bodies. As an example we recently received the SWIFT Certified Application Payments Label.” said Sonny Singh, General Manager Financial Services, Oracle. “It is of great importance for Oracle to model industry best practices and standards. Being a part of these organizations can help us ensure that we achieve that objective. Oracle has been supporting the IFX and BIAN standards for years in customer deployments, and our memberships further demonstrate our commitment to helping financial services firms meet their business and technology goals,” added Sonny Singh.

"The IFX Forum is very pleased to welcome Oracle into its membership.  This is a time of significant change in the financial services industry.  Standards are playing an important role in enabling dramatic new capabilities that can only work well if financial institutions and their partners work together to create smooth, interoperable solutions that are resilient in the face of rapid innovation,” said Richard Urban, President, IFX Forum, Inc.  “We are committed to that mission and believe Oracle can bring valuable expertise to our efforts.”

“BIAN, like Oracle, believes that technological innovation within financial services is essential for business growth. Having Oracle on board is a fantastic boost to the BIAN network and should be inspirational for others to join. BIAN can benefit from Oracle’s vast experience of providing specialized solutions across multiple industries, which can benefit BIAN as it continues the development of a standardized IT banking business framework for the global financial ecosystem,” said Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director of BIAN

Through Oracle’s membership in both BIAN and the IFX Forum, Oracle can contribute from experience gained delivering a broad range of solutions and technology to innovative financial institutions across the globe.  Critically both BIAN and IFX Forum include leading financial institutions in the definition of their standards thus helping to ensure that the standards address both the existing systems and business requirements and the future strategic requirements of banks.

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/.

ABOUT IFX FORUM

Founded in 1997, the Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) Forum is an international not-for-profit industry association whose mission is to develop IFX and promote its adoption as an open, interoperable standard for financial data exchange, suitable for use by all sectors of the financial services industry. The IFX Forum also promotes interoperability of industry standards by working cooperatively with other standards organizations and consortia. 

Forum membership is open to organizations interested in contributing to the development of open financial standards. Forum members include financial institutions, hardware, software and service firms, and related non-profit groups. IFX Forum Working Groups, in concert with an Architecture Committee to coordinate their efforts, develop open Internet-compatible messages for all sectors of the financial services industry. To learn more about IFX or the benefits of IFX Forum membership, please visit www.IFXForum.org.