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Agreed on June 2000. The European Commission and the ECB insist on the need for this standard to be used by 2002.
The IBAN concept was developed by ECBS and by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and is an internationally agreed standard ISO 13616: 1997
Its adoption is being driven within Europe, as it is supportive towards monetary union and the preparation of a "Euro-domestic" payment system. At the present time, there is only a very scant awareness of the ISO standard worldwide. It will take considerable effort, and time (a conservative estimate is between 5 and 10 years) before IBANs are used in a majority of worldwide cross-border transactions.
International banking standard
The European Parliament, the Commission and the European Central Bank have stressed the need for a wide and anticipated implementation of IBAN+BIC standards to reach complete efficiency of the STP framework from 1 January 2002.
IBAN (International Bank Account Number) is a European interoperability initiative for bank transfers. It is an internationally valid bank account identification number in the form of a combination consisting of the ISO country code, sorting/clearing code and customer account number. Its purpose is to facilitate the settlement of cross-border payments (to and from foreign countries) as the IBAN allows to identify the data on a customer's account, bank and country in a standardised manner and enables the banks instructed with the payment to verify this data. Consequently, for instance, incorrect account data which may result in delayed payment can be detected at an early stage.
State of deployment: standardised on a worldwide basis The structure of the IBAN is based on the ECBS standard. Its adoption is being driven within Europe, as it is supportive towards monetary union and the preparation of a "Euro-domestic" payment system. The BIC/SWIFT code of the beneficiary's bank (in case of transfer) will be required alongside the IBAN because the IBAN cannot be used as a routing tool until there is a wide-spread adoption of IBANs across the world.
http://www.ecbs.org/iban.htm
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