IBAN. What is it?

IBAN stands by International Bank Account Number and arrises by the need for a secure and known method to interchange bank information among financial, public and industry organizations.

IBAN is based on the definition made by the European Committee for Banking Standards in 1992. After that, the international community adopted and improved the standard by developing  ISO 13616. ISO 13616 was published in 1997 and has had subsequent revisions till the last one in 2007.

ISO 13616-1:2007 specifies the elements of an international bank account number (IBAN)  by which financial institutions and their customers can exchange, through electronic data interchange (EDI), customer account identification details in a computer-readable form.

It is also used in manual or paper-based information exchange.

Why is so important the IBAN validation?

The main benefits of using IBAN, and assuring its correctness are:

  • Reduction of the need for manual actions in the processing of data interchange among institutions in any industry
  • The improvement of  the level of confidence in the accuracy of the information provided
  • The certainty that the information provided is relevant to the country of ownership of the account.

The aim of Axy Validator is to provide an easy and configurable way of validating IBAN inside Salesforce for any of the business processes that need to manage bank information

Axy Validator will help to minimize payment rejections and all the costs related to managing those incidences. Reduces as well the bank commissions and charges so save money and time.

Is IBAN a globally unique method?

Every country and its financial institutions want to retain, as much as possible, their national identification methods. But they need to make international transactions as well.

IBAN provides a method whereby a reduced amount of change to country existing systems is required and, at the same time, proposes a means of structuring the information in a way that promotes automated processing of the information provided in a global environment.

IBAN, structure, and coding

The IBAN consists of up to 32 alphanumeric characters, as follows:

  • Country code using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, two capital letters
  • Two digits checksum
  • Basic Bank Account Number (BBAN) – up to 28 alphanumeric characters that are country-specific

BBAN is made by:

  • Account number, specific code that identifies an account in a bank.
  • Bank Identifier, that uniquely identifies the financial institution and, in some cases, the branch servicing an account

How IBAN is checked by Axy Validator?

Axy Validator provides two rules to validate IBAN: IBAN Multicountry – MultiField and IBAN Checksum

IBAN Multicountry – MultiField is a regex validation useful when the existing salesforce implementation has two fields for defining the IBAN, the country code and the rest of the IBAN number. It validates format and length.

IBAN Checksum, This rule validates the IBAN number in one only field using a checksum. IBAN can be written with or without spaces. With checksum validation, we assure that IBAN has no missing or wrong digits or letters, avoiding any typing error.

Both of them validate IBAN for more than 75 countries, the countries that have agreed to use IBAN.

They are listed by the IBAN Registration Authority, SWIFT and are published in Swift IBAN countries

Below you have the list of the countries.

  • Albania
  • Andorra
  • Austria
  • Azerbaijan
  • Bahrain
  • Belarus
  • Belgium
  • Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • Brazil
  • Bulgaria
  • Costa Rica
  • Croatia
  • Cyprus
  • Czech Republic
  • Denmark
  • Dominican Republic
  • El Salvador
  • Estonia
  • Faroe Islands
  • Finland
  • France
  • Georgia
  • Germany
  • Gibraltar
  • Greece
  • Greenland
  • Guatemala
  • Hungary
  • Iceland
  • Iraq
  • Ireland
  • Israel
  • Italy
  • Jordan
  • Kazakhstan
  • Kosovo
  • Kuwait
  • Latvia
  • Lebanon
  • Liechtenstein
  • Lithuania
  • Luxembourg
  • Macedonia
  • Malta
  • Mauritania
  • Mauritius
  • Moldova
  • Monaco
  • Montenegro
  • Netherlands
  • Norway
  • Pakistan
  • Palestine
  • Poland
  • Portugal
  • Qatar
  • Romania
  • Saint Lucia
  • San Marino
  • Sao Tome and Principe
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Serbia
  • Seychelles
  • Slovak Republic
  • Slovenia
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • Switzerland
  • Timor-Leste
  • Tunisia
  • Turkey
  • Ukraine
  • United Arab Emirates
  • United Kingdom
  • Vatican City
  • Virgin Islands, British

You can try Axy Validator (it is free) in TestDrive or installing it in your Salesforce org

More information on IBAN validation and usage
IBAN ISO standard definition
IBAN Checksum method and algorithm