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Thanks to Allah; I have passed "BIAN's Banking Architecture Foundation Certification" on Feb-2022. In this blog post, I’m sharing my experience on how you can achieve this certification.
Target Audience (Personal opinion)
This certification is targeting enterprise, business, application, data, solution, and integration architects working in FSI (Financial Services Industry) domain. It is not for infrastructure, technology architects.
Pre-requisites (Personal opinion)
Officially, there are no pre-requisites for the certification, but I think you need to have a look at the below pre-requisites from my point of view.
| Category | Pre-requisite | Mandatory / Preferred | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Experience | Have Enterprise Architecture experience or knowledge, such as a certificate or working experience in TOGAF Standard. | Must | The material considers you have knowledge in Enterprise Architecture and multiple domains are classified based on TOGAF standard. Even book chapters is addressing multiple domains and relations with TOGAF. |
| Experience | Having working experience in bank, Fintech or FSI service provider. | Must | Understanding BIAN artifacts (APIs, Service Domain landscape, ... etc) requires that you have working experience in FSI. |
| Experience | Understanding of ArchiMate as a modeling language. | Must | It is used as standard notation in most diagrams (Strategy, Business, Application, Composite). |
| Experience | Basic understanding of UML (Class, Sequence diagrams). | Preferred | It is used as standard notation. |
Version releases
I found two versions of the certification in the store as of the time of writing this blog. I wanted to highlight the difference for you to make sure you are selecting the latest version.
| The version in descending order | Exam Link / Certification Logo | Included book version | Book publish date | Book ISBN | Exam price | Service landscape version |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latest as of Feb-2022 |  |
 |
19-Jun-2021 | 978-9401807685 | Euro: 449.95 | V9 |
| Older |  |
 |
31-Jan-2019 | 978-9401803151 | Euro: 544.44 | Older |
Exam information
- Current code: BNF
- Title: BIAN Banking Architecture Foundation.
- Exam language: English - ESL has no time extension (There is a feature “Language aid” where you can set the language, and the exam engine provides Google translate feature in page content).
- Open book: No
- Supervised: No
- The number of questions: 60 MCQ (Question include negation) (Single & Multiple correct answers (The number of correct answers is mentioned in the question)).
- Exam duration: 60 mins
- Passing score: 42/60 (70% confirmed score from certN platform).
- Time / question: 1 min
- Cost: 449.95 EUR (Excluding taxes).
- Exam location: Online (There is an option for an on-site exam, but not aware of the details).
- Validity duration / Expiry: 2 years.
Study material
| Reference | Cost | Mandatory / Optional | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| BIAN – A framework for the financial services industry | 50.49 – 65 USD (Included in exam voucher, no need to pay) | Mandatory | Certification is based on this book. But, I found the below issues, I hope they can be corrected in the newer version: 1- Some diagrams' resolution is not good and should be enhanced, some of them were not readable. Figure 2-14, 2-22, 2-27, 4-4, 5-5, 5-9, 6-3, 7-9, 9-6, A2-1 2- Some diagrams should be in color (Example: heat maps) and color has semantic but it is found diagram in greyscale. Figure 2-20, 6-4 3- It seems that copyright and the watermarked document are not allowing rotating a page. This made it hard to view landscape-oriented pages. |
| BIAN Semantic API Practitioner’s Guide | Free | Mandatory (Personal opinion) | The first 3 chapters of this book clarified my understanding of BIAN. Especially “Figure 8 Diagram” which connected a lot of dots. |
| BIAN Open Digital Repository (v9.1) | Free | Mandatory | Navigating the service domain landscape is a must, and this is the online version. |
| BIAN Reference Implementations | Free | Optional | Not related to certification rather very good examples of companies adapting to BIAN standard. |
Study tips
- The exam depends on understanding more than memorization.
- The longest & most difficult chapter of the book "BIAN – A framework for the financial services industry" was "Chapter 2: Explaining the BIAN Architecture", my recommendation will be to read the first 3 chapters of "BIAN Semantic API Practitioner’s Guide" as a start before you read the official exam book for the following reasons:
- It contains examples for BIAN, that illustrated the idea of every component of BIAN toolbox and meta-model. I missed some of these examples in the main book.
- Uses simpler English and more straightforward wording than the original book.
Register for home online exam
- Purchase the exam from the link (Payment: Credit cards, Invoice, iDeal, Paypal).
- Separate email for download ebook, and you need to enter the voucher code for it.
- You will be able to download a PDF with your email.
- In the same email, you will get a link to "certn.global" for certification and subscription instructions.
- It uses the email without a password (It sends a code for every login).
- Log in and submit your name details, and agree on some terms & conditions.
- Enter “exam voucher code” to activate a new exam.
- You will get activated practice exams (12 attempts) & actual exams (2 attempts), these will be valid for 1 year since the day you added the voucher.
- Practice attempts of exams are available for 3 months for review.
- I have tried the exam on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge based on Chromium and both were working fine.
Getting exam results
Exam results are provided instantaneously, with the categorization of questions provided. You will be able to download the certification and share it on social networks as well.
References
- vhls.glbal: Official exam site
- Van Haren store: Exam page
- BIAN Services GmbH
- Request syllabus Download (Always download the latest, as it keeps updated)
- Complimentary BIAN Webinar: BIAN Book - 2nd Edition (fully revised) preview - A framework for the financial services industry
- Van Haren Exam Instructions – certN platform
- BIAN Channel on Vimeo
- BIAN Wiki
- BIAN Adoption journey