A typical British bank statement header (from a fictitious bank), showing the location of the account's IBAN

The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is an internationally agreed upon system of identifying bank accounts across national borders to facilitate the communication and processing of cross border transactions with a reduced risk of transcription errors. An IBAN uniquely identifies the account of a customer at a financial institution.^[1] It was originally adopted by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) and since 1997 as the international standard ISO 13616 under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The current version is ISO 13616:2020, which indicates the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) as the formal registrar. Initially developed to facilitate payments within the European Union, it has been implemented by most European countries and numerous countries in other parts of the world, mainly in the Middle East and the Caribbean. As of July 2023, 86 countries were using the IBAN numbering system.^[2]

The IBAN consists of up to 34 alphanumeric characters comprising a country code; two check digits; and a number that includes the domestic bank account number, branch identifier, and potential routing information. The check digits enable a check of the bank account number to confirm its integrity before submitting a transaction.

Background

Before IBAN, differing national standards for bank account identification (i.e. bank, branch, routing codes, and account number) were confusing for some users. This often led to necessary routing information being missing from payments. Routing information as specified by ISO 9362 (also known as Business Identifier Codes (BIC), SWIFT ID or SWIFT code, and SWIFT-BIC) does not require a specific format for the transaction so the identification of accounts and transaction types is left to agreements of the transaction partners. It also does not contain check digits, so errors of transcription were not detectable and it was not possible for a sending bank to validate the routing information prior to submitting the payment. Routing errors caused delayed payments and incurred extra costs to the sending and receiving banks and often to intermediate routing banks.^[3]

In 1997, to overcome these difficulties, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published ISO 13616:1997.^[4] This proposal had a degree of flexibility that the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) believed would make it unworkable, and they produced a "slimmed down" version of the standard which, amongst other things, permitted only upper-case letters and required that the IBAN for each country have a fixed length.^[5] ISO 13616:1997 was subsequently withdrawn and replaced by ISO 13616:2003.^[4] The standard was revised again in 2007 when it was split into two parts. ISO 13616-1:2007 "specifies the elements of an international bank account number (IBAN) used to facilitate the processing of data internationally in data interchange, in financial environments as well as within and between other industries" but "does not specify internal procedures, file organization techniques, storage media, languages, etc. to be used in its implementation".^[6] ISO 13616-2:2007 describes "the Registration Authority (RA) responsible for the registry of IBAN formats that are compliant with ISO 13616-1 [and] the procedures for registering ISO 13616-compliant IBAN formats".^[7] The official IBAN registrar under ISO 13616-2:2007 is SWIFT.^[8]

IBAN imposes a flexible but regular format sufficient for account identification and contains validation information to avoid errors of transcription. It carries all the routing information needed to get a payment from one bank to another wherever it may be; it contains key bank account details such as country code, branch codes (known as sort codes in the UK and Ireland) and account numbers, and it contains check digits which can be validated at source according to a single standard procedure.^[9] Where used, IBANs have reduced trans-national money transfer errors to under 0.1% of total payments

Structure

The IBAN consists of up to 34 alphanumeric characters, as follows:

• country code using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 – two letters,
• check digits – two digits, and
• Basic Bank Account Number (BBAN) – up to 30 alphanumeric characters that are country-specific.^[2]

The check digits represent the checksum of the bank account number which is used by banking systems to confirm that the number contains no simple errors.

In order to facilitate reading by humans, IBANs are traditionally expressed in groups of four characters separated by spaces, the last group being of variable length as shown in the example below; when transmitted electronically however spaces are omitted.^[2]

Permitted IBAN characters are the digits 0 to 9 and the 26 Latin alphabetic characters A to Z.^[10] This applies even in countries where these characters are not used in the national language (e.g. Greece).

Processing

One of the design aims of the IBAN was to enable as much validation as possible to be done at the point of data entry.^[11] In particular, the computer program that accepts an IBAN will be able to validate:

• Country code
• Number of characters in the IBAN correspond to the number specified for the country code
• BBAN format specified for the country code
• Account number, bank code and country code combination is compatible with the check digits

The check digits are calculated using MOD-97-10 as per ISO/IEC 7064:2003^[10] (abbreviated to mod-97 in this article), which specifies a set of check character systems capable of protecting strings against errors which occur when people copy or key data. In particular, the standard states that the following can be detected:

• All single substitution errors (the substitution of a single character for another, for example 4234 for 1234)
• All or nearly all single (local) transposition errors (the transposition of two single characters, either adjacent or with one character between them, for example 12354 or 12543 for 12345)
• All or nearly all shift errors (shifts of the whole string to the left or right)
• High proportion of double substitution errors (two separate single substitution errors in the same string, for example 7234587 for 1234567)
• High proportion of all other errors

The underlying rules for IBANs is that the account-servicing financial institution should issue an IBAN, as there are a number of areas where different IBANs could be generated from the same account and branch numbers that would satisfy the generic IBAN validation rules. In particular cases where 00 is a valid check digit, 97 will not be a valid check digit, likewise, if 01 is a valid check digit, 98 will not be a valid check digit, similarly with 02 and 99.

The UN CEFACT TBG5 has published a free IBAN validation service in 32 languages for all 57 countries that have adopted the IBAN standard.^[12] They have also published the Javascript source code of the verification algorithm.^[13]

An English language IBAN checker for ECBS member country bank accounts is available on its website.^[14]

National check digits

In addition to the IBAN check digits, many countries have their own national check digits used within the BBAN, as part of their national account number formats. Each country determines its own algorithm used for assigning and validating the national check digits - some relying on international standards, some inventing their own national standard, and some allowing each bank to decide if or how to implement them. Some algorithms apply to the entire BBAN, and others to one or more of the fields within it. The check digits may be considered an integral part of the account number, or an external field separate from the account number, depending on the country's rules.

Most of the variations used are based on two categories of algorithms:

- ISO 7064 MOD-97-10: Treat the account number as a large integer, divide it by 97 and use the remainder or its complement as the check digit(s).

- Weighted sum: Treat the account number as a series of individual numbers, multiply each number by a weight value according to its position in the string, sum the products, divide the sum by a modulus (usually 10 or 11) and use the remainder or its complement as the check digit.

In both cases, there may first be a translation from alphanumeric characters to numbers using conversion tables. The complement, if used, means the remainder r is subtracted from a fixed value, usually the modulus or the modulus plus one (with the common exception that a remainder of 0 results in 0, denoted as 0 → 0, as opposed to e.g. 0 → 97 meaning that if the reminder is zero the checksum is 97). Note that some national specifications define the weights order from right to left, but since the BBAN length in the IBAN is fixed, they can be used from left to right as well.

National check digits in the International Bank Account Number system

Country	Algorithm	Weights	Modulo	Complement	Comments
Albania[16]	Weighted	9, 7, 3, 1, 9, 7, 3, 1	10	10 − r, 0 → 0	Applies only to the bank code + branch code fields.
Belgium[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10 (variant)		97	r, 0 → 97	Applied to bank code + account number.
Bosnia and Herzegovina[18]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10		97	98 − r
Croatia[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-11-10		11, 10	11 − r	Calculated separately for the bank code (seven digits) and account number (ten digits). Both should be 9.
Czech Republic[17]	Weighted	6, 3, 7, 9, 10, 5, 8, 4, 2, 1	11	11 − r, 0 → 0	Calculated separately for the account number (ten digits) and branch number (six digits, using the last six weights). Both should be 0.
East Timor	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10		97	98 − r	Applied to the whole bban (bank code concatenated with account number) appended with "00".
Estonia[17][19][20]	Weighted	7, 1, 3, 7, 1, 3, 7, 1, 3, 7, 1, 3, 7	10	10 − r, 0 → 0	Applies only to the branch code + account number fields (ignoring the bank code). Before multiplying by weights the resulting part of IBAN (i.e. branch code + account number) is reversed.
Finland[17]	Luhn	2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2	10	10 − r, 0 → 0	Uses the Luhn Algorithm, where the sum is taken of the individual digits of the multiplication products rather than the products themselves.
France[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10 (variant)		97	97 − r	The mapping form characters to coefficients is non-standard: the digits 0–9 are converted to their respective values, letters 'A–I' converted to 1–9, letters J–R converted to 1–9 and letters S–Z converted to 2–9, respectively. After the transliteration, the part of IBAN is read as number. This is performed for bank code, branch code, and account number. Each of them is then multiplied by the proper multiplier (89, 15, 3) respectively (these constants are remainders of dividing ${\displaystyle 10^{18}}$, ${\displaystyle 10^{13}}$ and ${\displaystyle 10^{2}}$ by 97 respectively - using them do not change the result, but simplify the calculation[21]). The three numbers are then summed and the algorithm is performed on the result of this summation.
Hungary[17]	Weighted	9, 7, 3, 1, 9, 7, 3, 1, 9, 7, 3, 1, 9, 7, 3, 1	10	10 − r, 0 → 0	There are two separate check digits—one for the bank code + branch code, and one for the account number, each calculated separately.
Iceland[17]	Weighted	3, 2, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2	11	11 − r, 0 → 0	Applies only to the first eight digits of the national identification number (kennitala), with the check digit stored at the 9th.
Italy[17]	Conversion + Sum		26	r	Characters are converted to digits using two different conversion tables, one for odd positions and one for even positions (the first character is considered odd). Odd-positioned digits 0–9 are converted to their respective values in the sequence 1, 0, 5, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, and characters in the range A–Z are converted to 1, 0, 5, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 2, 4, 18, 20, 11, 3, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 10, 22, 25, 24, 23 respectively. Even-positioned characters are converted using the natural zero-based value, i.e. digits 0–9 converted to the respective numbers 0–9, and letters A–Z to the range 0–25. After conversion the numbers are summed (without weights), and the result taken modulo 26. This is then converted back into a single letter in the range A–Z (in natural order) which is used as the check digit (or rather, check character).
Mauritania	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10 (variant)		97	97 − r
Monaco[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10 (variant)		97	97 − r	Uses the same algorithm as France.
Montenegro[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10		97	98 − r
North Macedonia[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10		97	98 − r
Norway[17]	Weighted	5, 4, 3, 2, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2	11	11 − r, 0 → 0, 1 → invalid	If the first two digits of the account number (not the bank code) are both zeros, then the calculation applies only to the remaining four digits of the account number, otherwise it applies to the entire BBAN (bank code + account number).
Poland[17][22]	Weighted	3, 9, 7, 1, 3, 9, 7	10	10 − r, 0 → 0	Applies only to the bank code + branch code (without the account number).
Portugal[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10		97	98 − r
San Marino[17]	Conversion + Sum		26	r	Uses the same algorithm as Italy.
Serbia[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10		97	98 − r
Slovakia[17]	Weighted	6, 3, 7, 9, 10, 5, 8, 4, 2, 1	11	11 − r, 0 → 0	Calculated separately for the account number (ten digits) and branch number (six digits, using the last six weights). Same as Czech Republic.
Slovenia[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10		97	98 − r
Spain[17]	Weighted	1, 2, 4, 8, 5, 10, 9, 7, 3, 6	11	11 − r, 0 → 0, 1 → 1	There are two separate check digits—one for the bank code + branch code, and one for the account number, each calculated separately. The account number is ten characters long and uses all of the weights, whereas the bank code + branch code are eight characters long and thus use only the last eight weights in the calculation (or equivalently, pad with two zeros on the left and use the ten weights).
Tunisia[17]	ISO 7064 MOD-97-10 (variant)		97	97 − r

Adoption

Adoption of the IBAN

  IBAN structure is defined

  IBAN structure is registered with SWIFT

  Country participates in SEPA

  Euro is country's currency

International bank transactions use either an IBAN or the ISO 9362 Business Identifier Code system (BIC or SWIFT code) in conjunction with the BBAN (Basic Bank Account Number).^[23]

EEA and territories

The banks of most countries in Europe publish account numbers using both the IBAN format and the nationally recognised identifiers, this being mandatory within the European Economic Area.^[24]

Day-to-day administration of banking in British Overseas Territories varies from territory to territory; some, such as South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, have too small a population to warrant a banking system while others, such as Bermuda, have a thriving financial sector.^[25] The use of the IBAN is up to the local government—Gibraltar, formerly part of the European Union is required to use the IBAN,^[24] as are the Crown Dependencies, which use the British clearing system,^[26] and the British Virgin Islands have chosen to do so. As of April 2013, no other British Overseas Territories have chosen to use the IBAN.^[2] Banks in the Caribbean Netherlands also do not use the IBAN.

As of February 2014, the IBAN is mandatory for all banking transactions in countries that use the euro.

Single Euro Payments Area

Main article: Single Euro Payments Area

The IBAN designation scheme was chosen as the foundation for electronic straight-through processing in the European Economic Area. The European Parliament mandated that a bank charge needs to be the same amount for domestic credit transfers as for cross-border credit transfers regulated in decision 2560/2001 (updated in 924/2009).^[24] This regulation took effect in 2003. Only payments in euro up to €12,500 to a bank account designated by its IBAN were covered by the regulation, not payments in other currencies.

The Euro Payments regulation was the foundation for the decision to create a Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). The European Central Bank has created the TARGET2 interbank network that unifies the technical infrastructure of the 26 central banks of the European Union (although Sweden has opted out). SEPA is a self-regulatory initiative by the banking sector of Europe as represented in the European Payments Council (EPC). The European Union made the scheme mandatory through the Payment Services Directive published in 2007. Since January 2008, all countries were required to support SEPA credit transfer, and SEPA direct debit was required to be supported since November 2009. The regulation on SEPA payments increased the charge cap (same price for domestic payments as for cross-border payments) to €50,000.

With a further decision of the European Parliament, the IBAN scheme for bank accounts fully replaced the domestic numbering schemes from 31 December 2012.^[27] On 16 December 2010, the European Commission published regulations that made IBAN support mandatory for domestic credit transfer by 2013 and for domestic direct debit by 2014 (with a 12 and 24 months transition period respectively).^[28] Some countries had already replaced their traditional bank account scheme by IBAN. This included Switzerland where IBAN was introduced for national credit transfer on 1 January 2006 and the support for the old bank account numbers was not required from 1 January 2010.^[29]

Based on a 20 December 2011 memorandum,^[30] the EU parliament resolved the mandatory dates for the adoption of the IBAN on 14 February 2012.^[31] On 1 February 2014, all national systems for credit transfer and direct debit were abolished and replaced by an IBAN-based system.^[31] This was then extended to all cross-border SEPA transactions on 1 February 2016 (Article 5 Section 7).^[31] After these dates the IBAN is sufficient to identify an account for home and foreign financial transactions in SEPA countries and banks are no longer permitted to require that the customer supply the BIC for the beneficiary's bank.

In the run-up to the 1 February 2014 deadline, it became apparent that many old bank account numbers had not been allocated IBANs—an issue that was addressed on a country-by-country basis. In Germany, for example, Deutsche Bundesbank and the German Banking Industry Committee required that all holders of German bank codes ("Bankleitzahl") published the specifics of their IBAN generation format taking into account not only the generation of check digits but also the handling of legacy bank codes, thereby enabling third parties to generate IBANs independently of the bank.^[32] The first such catalogue was published in June 2013 as a variant of the old bank code catalog ("Bankleitzahlendatei").^[33]

See also

• Bank card number
• Bank regulation
• ABA routing transit number
• Routing number (Canada)
• EPC QR code

Notes

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to IBAN.

• "Official ISO 13616 Registry" (PDF). Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).
• "ISO 13616-1:2007". International Organization for Standardization (ISO). 28 February 2020.