For organisations within the Eurozone the requirement to use BIC and IBAN as the standard international and domestic account identifiers has been put in place. In addition in order to successfully participate in the SEPA Direct Debit and SEPA Credit Transfer schemes organisations must provide accurate BIC and IBAN data. As the 2010 SEPA deadline for all account details to be provided in this format approaches, organisations face the challenge of converting tens of thousands, if not millions, of customer details into BIC and IBAN.
Who will be most affected?
The organisations that will be most heavily impacted by this requirement are the largest B2C businesses with extensive customer and supplier bases. As banks will not be providing a service to convert domestic details, organisations will need to seek out their own solution to this problem.
There are two options available:
- Assign internal resource to contact each customer individually to acquire their BIC and IBAN details and update their database record
- Source a vendor solution that will perform a conversion to BIC and IBAN format and validate the content of the IBANs
The first option will be a hugely time consuming and expensive exercise that will not be feasible for the majority of organisations and does not make a sound business model. With regards to the second option it is important that organisations identify a tried and trusted validation solution which performs an accurate conversion and verifies the IBANs at the same time.
Get it right, keep it right
However, converting from domestic details to BIC and IBAN is only one aspect of the problem. To ensure the efficiency of a payments database over time it is important that organisations only input accurate data on an ongoing basis. Incorrectly captured or out of date payment information will result in rejections which are costly to rectify.
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