10 June 2013

Reliable IBAN/BIC conversions by BL IBAN Converter

Business-Logics launches the IBAN Converter as a tool for payment service providers and enterprises for the easy and reliable migration from account number and bank code to IBAN and BIC

As a part of the migration from national payment formats to SEPA formats all accounts in the entire data inventory have to be changed from account number and bank code to IBAN and BIC. Beside the organizational and technical challenge of the migration payment service providers and enterprises also have to cope with the purely bank-specific requirements of the IBAN conversion.

As is generally known, the devil is in the details, which stands out latest when looking at the list of IBAN rules published by the German Bundesbank. Hence it is no surprise that the majority of IBAN converters available for Germany implement just the straightforward case of combining account number and bank code with a checksum and the country code. However for practical use, such implementations are not recommendable, because they introduce invalid bank connections into the data inventory and lead to high efforts for rectification and wrong transactions.

For this reason Business-Logics offers the complete implementation of all rules for Germany as a program and software component. The method applied in the BL IBAN Converter corresponds exactly to the IBAN rules set by the German Bundesbank and especially includes the mandatory checksum calculation for account numbers according to the updated file of bank codes. Hence the software is able to include deletions and changes of bank codes in the calculation and the return value.

For batch processing the BL IBAN converter supports the file specifications and data record description for the so-called IBAN-back-and-forth method of the "The German Banking Industry Committee" (DK). In other words: Input and output of the program are standardized by a format specified by DK.

Moreover, software makers, services providers and enterprises can integrate the software into their own programs as a Java API. Additionally, the converter can be invoked via command line interface or from other programs.

As usual Business-Logics offers reliable support also for this product, including updates for changes in the files of bank codes or adjustments of IBAN rules of individual banks.