The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is an international standard for identifying bank accounts across national borders with a minimal of risk of propagating transcription errors. It was originally adopted by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS), and was later adopted as an international standard under ISO 13616:1997 and now as ISO 13616-1:2007.[1] The official IBAN registrar under ISO 13616-2:2007[2] is SWIFT.[3]
The IBAN was originally developed to facilitate payments within the European Union but the format is flexible enough to be applied globally. It consists of a ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, followed by two check digits that are calculated using a mod-97 technique, and Basic Bank Account Number (BBAN) with up to thirty alphanumeric characters.[4] The BBAN includes the domestic bank account number and potentially routing information. The national banking communities decide individually on a fixed length for all BBAN in their country.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ("SWIFT") operates a worldwide financial messaging network which exchanges messages between banks and other financial institutions. SWIFT also markets software and services to financial institutions, much of it for use on the SWIFTNet Network, and ISO 9362 bank identifier codes (BICs) are popularly known as "SWIFT codes".