What is IBAN?
IBAN stands for International Bank Account Number. An IBAN is not a new account number, but simply a new format for an existing bank account number that will be recognised internationally. It has been developed by the European Committee for Banking Standards to improve the efficiency of cross-border payments with regard to speed, quality and cost. The IBAN is being introduced in Europe to facilitate the automatic processing of cross-border payments. IBANs include all the necessary details for a receiving bank to apply the payment directly to a beneficiary’s bank account without any manual intervention. An IBAN contains information relating to the country, bank and branch of the beneficiary as well as the account number itself. A comparison with a telephone number can help illustrate this. For local calls the basic phone number is sufficient, for international calls the country and area code are required. Similarly with payments, the basic account number can be used domestically, but th
