What does IBAN mean?
IBAN stands for "International Bank Account Number" and is an international standard for identifying bank accounts across borders. The advantage of IBAN is that its unique coding facilitates routing and helps stop errors (and thus delays) in payments occurring. There are differences between the IBAN paper and electronic formats. In the former, the letters, IBAN come at the start and then the rest is split into groups of four characters whereas when stored or transferred electronically, the IBAN number starts with the country code and must contain no spaces.
Examples:
Paper format: IBAN DE89 3705 0299 1234 5678 90
Electronic format: DE89370502991234567890.
As the IBAN system is new and it the new standard has not been fully adopted by banks worldwide, we advise that you should continue ato provide the SWIFT/BIC code of the recipient bank for the time being.
