October 02, 2008 CGI Group, Inc. (Montreal) has joined Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), (Frankfurt), a not-for-profit association focused on the standardization and promotion of banking specific IT services among its members.

BIAN's goal is to enable banks to rapidly adapt their IT systems to strategic and operational business changes and to enhance interoperability between banks. To achieve this, BIAN seeks to accelerate the adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the banking industry, fostering easier and more cost effective integration of SOA for financial institutions. Leveraging existing technology standards and specifications, BIAN aims to create a comprehensive framework of business-focused semantic services for banking. The framework will provide a model that institutions can use to rapidly integrate best of breed SOA components into highly functional and flexible applications, providing a cost effective way to migrate from today's legacy systems to the more agile, SOA-based next-generation banking platforms.