Some of you were a little confused by what suddenly appeared on your
bills – no more account number, bank code no?
SEPA is the latest craze in the world of bank transfers and will replace
account number and sort code redundant from February 2014. Until then
you can still transfer both ways. We have taken the liberty to simply
replace the account number and sort code through BIC and IBAN already.
SEPA stands for “Single European Payments Area” and is sort of the next
step after the introduction of the euro: uniform standards for European
credit transfers, direct debit and card payments. These standards will
apply to all countries of the European Union, Switzerland, Monaco,
Liechtenstein and Norway.
For these transfers you’ll need the IBAN and the BIC. For domestic
transfers the IBAN will be sufficient. They also promised that these
transfers will run much faster, but we’ll see …
IBAN stands for International Bank Account Number. Its structured
according to a fixed pattern: Country code (2 digits) – Check digit (2
digits) – up to 30 digits for a unique national identification of the
account (only in Germany BLZ + account number) . For Germany its always
a total of 22 digits (including zeros for shorter account numbers).
BIC stands for Bank Identifier Code. This internationally unique
identifier of the bank has 11 digits and consists of a number of codes,
which are much less comprehensible than the IBAN.
And sorry we didn’t inform you sooner. We thought that you might heard
of it already! Which obviously was pretty naive 😉