IBANs have been introduced to standardise the identification of bank accounts. It is essential to realise the following points regarding the IBAN:

• The IBAN is not a new account number.
• Your existing bank code and account number(s) will not be replaced.
• Additional characters will appear in front of your existing bank code and account numbers.

The complete identifier, original bank code and account number, plus the additional characters will be known as the IBAN. IBAN implementation will facilitate improvements in the quality of information exchanged between parties involved in European cross-border payments and will help reduce errors and delays.

Please note that the IBAN provides a guard against the accidental transposition of its characters/numbers. Its validation does not guarantee that the bank code or account number is correct. Nor does it guarantee that the account actually exists, or is live.

Officially an IBAN can only be issued for an account by the bank which services the account. The account owner is responsible for communicating their IBAN to their trading partner(s). It is unwise to take IBANs from any other source. It is also unwise to generate them from any source other than one provided by the account servicing bank. These other sources may be misinformed and give inaccurate or incorrect IBANs, and thus may cause delays in the payment process.