Международный номер банковского счета (IBAN)

Alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies a bank account in any participating country

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. 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. By July 2023, 86 countries were using the IBAN numbering system. In 1997, to overcome these difficulties, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published ISO 13616:1997. 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. 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". The official IBAN registrar under ISO 13616 2:2007 is SWIFT. 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. Where used, IBANs have reduced trans national money transfer errors to under 0.1% of total payments

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. 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. The use of the IBAN is up to the local government—Gibraltar, formerly part of the European Union is required to use the IBAN, and the British Virgin Islands have chosen to do so. as of 2013, no other British Overseas Territories have chosen to use the IBAN. 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). 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. Based on a 20 December 2011 memorandum, the EU parliament resolved the mandatory dates for the adoption of the IBAN on 14 February 2012. On 1 February 2014, all national systems for credit transfer and direct debit were abolished and replaced by an IBAN based system. The first such catalogue was published in June 2013 as a variant of the old bank code catalog ("Bankleitzahlendatei").

Banks in numerous non European countries including most states of the Middle East, North Africa and the Caribbean have implemented the IBAN format for account identification. This practice in Ukraine ended on 1 November 2019 when all Ukrainian banks had fully switched to the IBAN standard. The degree to which a bank verifies the validity of a recipient's bank account number depends on the configuration of the transmitting bank's software—many major software packages supply bank account validation as a standard function. Some banks outside Europe may not recognize IBAN, though this is expected to diminish with time. Non European banks usually accept IBANs for accounts in Europe, although they might not treat IBANs differently from other foreign bank account numbers. In particular, they might not check the IBAN's validity prior to sending the transfer. Banks in the United States do not use IBAN as account numbers for U. S. accounts and use ABA routing transit numbers. Any adoption of the IBAN standard by U. S. banks would likely be initiated by ANSI ASC X9, the U. S. financial services standards development organization: a working group (X9B20) was established as an X9 subcommittee to generate an IBAN construction for U. S. bank accounts. Canadian financial institutions have not adopted IBAN and use routing numbers issued by Payments Canada for domestic transfers, and SWIFT for international transfers. There is no formal governmental or private sector regulatory requirement in Canada for the major banks to use IBAN. Australia and New Zealand do not use IBAN. They use Bank State Branch codes for domestic transfers and SWIFT for international transfers.