What is an IBAN?
IBAN is an acronym, which stands for International Bank Account Number. It is a standard way of uniquely identifying an account for the purpose of improving the efficiency and speed of cross border payments. IBANs have been developed by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) and the International Standards Organisation (ISO) who have published an internationally agreed standard (ISO 13616:1997). This standard has since been updated for EU purposes in EBS204.
The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is a series of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies an account held at an overseas bank. An IBAN is not a new bank account number but a way of representing account numbers in an internationally recognised standard format. If you have been provided an IBAN always enter it in the recipient account number field. An IBAN is a mandatory requirement when sending payments to certain European and United Kingdom countries. All IBANs start with a two (2) letter country code and contain between sixteen (16) and thirty-four (34) letters and numbers. The length of an IBAN will differ depending on the country, but its length must be fixed for any given country.
