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The ‘International Bank Account Number (IBAN) only’ rule introduced on the basis of Article 5 (7) of the European Union (EU) ‘Regulation (EU) No 260/2012 establishing technical and business requirements for credit transfers and direct debits in euro’ adopted by the EU legislator in February 2012 prohibits payment service providers (PSPs) to require that payment service users (PSUs) provide the Business Identifier Code (BIC). Article 5 (7) states: “After 1 February 2014 for national payment transactions and after 1 February 2016 for cross-border payment transactions, PSPs shall not require PSUs to indicate the BIC of the PSP of a payer or of the PSP of a payee.”
PSPs however, will have to continue to indicate the BIC of the account to be debited or credited when processing a Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payment transaction in the interbank space. A survey carried out by the European Payments Council (EPC) at the end of 2012 indicated that no mature solution seemed to be in place which allows deriving the BIC from the IBAN with regard to cross-border SEPA transactions. PSPs need as close as possible to 100 percent reliability when determining the PSP of the receiver in order to ensure timely and proper execution of the payment instruction.
The EPC intends to host a workshop on 24 September 2013 in Brussels to initiate a dialogue on the minimum requirements for cross-border ‘BIC from IBAN derivation’ solutions. The event will be open to any interested party. The confirmation of the workshop will be subject to sufficient interest being expressed by both the demand and the supply sides in SEPA to jointly work on the minimum requirements for any reliable cross-border ‘BIC from IBAN derivation’ solutions.