Swift Code Definition

The acronym Swift is the acronym in English that corresponds to Society for World Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which is a company that manages the communication among most banks in the world. Thus, the code Swift, which is sometimes called the BIC code or Bank Identified Code, is a set of digits used by the banks so that their clients can carry out international operations, especially so that they can send or receive money.

The purpose of this code is to increase the measures of safety related to international banking operations.

A detailed explanation

In the first place, the Swift code is used to identify a bank and not the client with a checking account.

Swift code is part of the rule ISO 3166-1, the normative of the International Organization for Standardization that provides the codes used for the ID of the nations.

As a general rule, this code consists of 8 or 11 digits distributed as follows: the first four characters identify the entity bank, the next two characters are identifiers of the country where the bank account is located, the other two refer to the town where there is the

Bank and the last three characters refer to the bank office and are optional.

Difference between Swift code and IBAN code

The main difference is that the Swift code identifies the bank and the IBAN code is an identifier of a customer's checking account. The IBAN code is used within the framework of the European Union and the Swift or BIC has a dimension international.

In both cases, they are identification systems that seek to standardize banking operations and guarantee the security of money movements and transactions. While the IBAN code has a total of 24 characters, the Swift code ranges from 8 to 11 characters.

Codes in banking terminology

There are three most important bank codes: the Swift, the IBAN and the CCC or Customer Account Code. This means that the entire code related to a checking account consists of 8 or 11 digits of the Swift, plus 24 digits of the IBAN, that is, a total of 32 or 35 numbers. On the other hand, if a customer wants to operate with his bank through online banking, he must also use other access codes or passwords.

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