The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is an international standard for numbering of bank accounts. IBAN was originally adopted by the European Committee for Banking Standards, and later accepted as an international standard under ISO 13616:1997, now ISO 13616:2007.
IBAN was initially developed to facilitate payments within the European Union, but its form was flexible enough to be applied globally. Within the European Union, IBAN is one of the basic conditions for automatic data processing for foreign payments.
IBAN consists of a two-letter ISO 3166-1 country code, followed by two check digits and up to thirty alphanumeric characters for the bank account number. The decision on the number of characters is left to each country, provided that all accounts in a single country must have the same number of characters. The use of check digits minimises the risk of propagating transcription errors.
The use of IBAN has been obligatory in the Republic of Croatia since 1 June 2013, which has laid the basic precondition for the participation of credit institutions with their head office in the country in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).