Eiger Systems, an Experian company and a developer of strategic payment application, has called for the industry to pay as much attention to the accuracy of IBAN data as it does to the correct formatting of IBANs.
“The industry is awash with online tools to check the correct construction of IBANs,” said Jonathan Williams, Eiger Systems’ principal market strategist. “But these tools cannot check the existence of the data to which the IBAN refers, and often fail to advise the user of this. This could create a false sense of security amongst users.”
Williams said there is a world of difference between correctly formatting an IBAN and ensuring that the data underlying the IBAN is correct, or even exists at all.
“Banks and corporates must make this link between format validation and data validation,” he said. “Only if the data is validated at the same time that the format is validated can corporates hope to avoid repair or rejection charges and the payment delays that inevitably result.”