Domestic payment

IBAN (International Bank Account Number) is a bank account granted to clients in banks and credit institutions according to the international ISO13616 standard.

The European Bank Standard Committee (ECBS) in the middle 90-ties decided that a more transparent and internationally recognised client account number and financial establishment's identifier should be established in order to decrease the number of errors in payments and accelerate processing of payments. Therefore, in 1997 this committee made a decision on implementation of a new account number format - IBAN in financial establishments of European countries. This format allows to recognise the beneficiary's country and account, as well as check the mathematical correctness of the indicated beneficiary's account.

In each country the length of IBAN account number may be different - even up to 34 letter and digit signs, which consist of:

• 2 letter country code
• 2 verification digits
• bank code
• bank's client's account number (0-9,A-Z)

Latvia's IBAN corresponds to the international IBAN standard, which in its structure is similar to client account identifiers used in other European countries for cross-border payments and will be recognised in cross-border payment documents in all countries where IBAN standard is implemented.

Latvia's IBAN consists of 21 symbol: 2 letters (country code) + 2 digits (control digits) + 4 letters (bank's BIC code) + 13 signs (account number, for currently shorter account numbers the missing signs will be replaced by zeros).

Swedbank assigned IBAN numbers to all of its clients on February 7, 2004. The old account numbers were transformed, and all newly opened account as from this date are only in IBAN standard.

Swedbank's account number in IBAN format is as follows:

From the very cooperation partner (including state authorities) only, who is the holder of the account and is aware of IBAN.

• Starting from 01.01.2005, payments to Latvian banks will not be accepted if the indicated beneficiary's account number does not comply with IBAN standard.
• There are no changes regarding payments in other currencies to other countries and the payments will be accepted in the same way as until now.

IBAN always starts with the country code of the respective European country, for example, LV, DE, IT. Additionally, compliance with IBAN of the beneficiary's account number of any country may be checked with the IBAN verification calculator. You can view the IBAN structure of some countries on the home page of European Banks standards in a brochure available for download. One should note that IBAN accounts in other countries usually is not equal to the one used in Latvia, after the country code there may be both letters and digits used.

IBAN examples:

Obviously there is an error in the account number. In practice, most frequent mistakes are missing symbols, or the digit "1" is mixed with the letter "I", the digit "0" - mixed with the letter "O", there is no country code, etc. In order to clarify the current account, you should contact the beneficiary of payment and specify the account number.

The same way as before, for payments to another bank in Latvia you choose the beneficiary's bank/institution, for example, the State Treasury, BIC: TRELLV22, and in addition to the previous procedure, if you have, you indicate the budget code, for example:

In the same way as with payments to another bank in Latvia, the beneficiary's bank/institution is chosen to be the State Treasury, BIC: TRELLV22, for example:

The same way as with payments to another bank in Latvia, the beneficiary's bank/institution is chosen to be Latvijas Pasts, BIC: LPNSLV21, for example: