The BIC is a unique, standardized string which allows to identify banks all over the world. The global management of the BICs is organized by the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), therefore it is also often called SWIFT code. The BIC is essential for the unique identification of credit institutions in international payments. The IBAN, without changing the existing structures, can not completely replace the BIC, because it contains not all necessary routing information. Accordingly, the BIC is used also in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) although the acceptance of the IBAN in Europe is very high.
The BIC consists of exactly 11 alpha numeric characters (uppercase letters and digits). In the representation, the last 3 digits (branch code) can be omitted if they are unused and therefore equals standard value. Therefore, also a length of exactly 8 characters is allowed.
| b | b | b | b | o | o | X | X | X |
| b | Bank code |
|---|---|
| Country code ISO 3166-1 | |
| o | Location code |
| X | Bank-Branch code (optional) |
The default value for the unused parts of the branch code is 'X'. For example, for the appearance of a BIC with standard branch code, the following spellings would be valid:
1234DE12XXX
1234DE12