The Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) announced the adoption of the International Bank Account Number (IBAN), an international standard for the numbering of bank customer accounts in the Kingdom of Bahrain and accredited by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to serve its customers in the Kingdom of Bahrain, starting from the end of January 2012.
This move towards IBAN is to express bank customer account numbers in an ISO standard compliant format. The use of such an internationally accepted format will immensely improve the efficiency of electronic payments and bring a number of benefits to bank customers.
Banks will be able to process a transaction efficiently and promptly through processing the IBAN of the recipient and will allow the bank customers to make or receive their payments much faster.
“The adoption of IBAN is a step to increase the efficiency of electronic payments in Bahrain,” said Ahmed Buhijji, Director of the Banking Services Directorate at the Central Bank of Bahrain.
The IBAN Committee, formed in early 2010, headed by the Central Bank of Bahrain and comprised of representatives from the retail banks and the Bahrain Association of Banks, worked out the most design criteria if the IBAN format for the Kingdom of Bahrain, in addition to its implementation timeline.
The IBAN format consists of 22 characters which comprise of letters and numbers referencing the Kingdom of Bahrain.
The Central Bank of Bahrain commends the efforts and cooperation put forth by the banks in order to accomplish this initiative where the banks will begin to issue IBAN to their customers in early September 2011 as an entail phase. Customers will then be able to use IBAN in making payments from 31st January, 2012.