International Bank Account Number

The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is an international standard for numbering bank accounts. It was originally adopted by the European Committee for Bank Standardisation[?], and was later adopted as ISO 13616[?]:1997. The IBAN consists of a two letter ISO 3166-1 country code, followed by two check digits, and up to thirty alphanumeric characters for the domestic bank account number, called the BBAN (Basic Bank Account Number). It is up to each country's national banking community to decide on the length of the BBAN for accounts in that country, but its length must be fixed for any given country. A unique identifying code for the bank, of a fixed length and at a fixed position, is required to be contained in the BBAN. However, it is left up to the national banking communities to determine its length and position within the BBAN, so long as it is constant for each country.

When stored electronically, the IBAN is not to be broken up by spaces; but when printed on paper, it is to be expressed in groups of four characters, with the last group of variable length.

The IBAN was developed to help improve the payments system within the European Union. Customers, especially individuals and SMEs[?], are frequently confused by differing national standards for bank account numbers. While the system is capable of being used for routing purposes, it cannot at present be used to do so since the IBAN has not been widely adopted outside of Europe, and the ECBS expects that the process of adoption may take five to ten years. Until then, it is necessary to continue to use the current ISO 9362[?] Bank Identifier Code[?] or BIC system in conjunction with the IBAN in order to ensure proper routing.

Examples

German IBAN is build like: DE 73 5901 0066 0003 5766 61 The first two 4-digit pairs represent a bank and the last 10-digits an account.

External Links

The latest ECBS version of the standard is EBS 204 V3 (http://www.ecbs.org/Download/EBS204_V3.PDF).