Azerbaijan, Baku, April 29/Trend, N. Ismailova
In accordance with the Central Bank of Azerbaijan's (CBA) decision, the IBAN payment system will be applied in inter-bank payments and on clients' accounts starting from September 2012, banking circles reported on Friday.
IBAN is a banking account number set up in conformity with the international standard ISO 13616, which was specified by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) and the International Standardization Organization (ISO), and shall be issued by financial institutions to their clients.
The principle objectives are the sophistication of the banking client identification process in the sphere of electronic payments, the upgrading of the automation level in payment processing, and the elimination of the current system's scattered nature.
To accomplish this goal, a working group of representatives of the CBA, Tax Ministry, Finance Ministry, State Social Protection Fund, the Association of Banks of Azerbaijan, and commercial banks including the International Bank of Azerbaijan, Kapital Bank, Standard Bank, Unibank, Bank Respublika, and Mugan Bank was established on June 17, 2010.
The working group determined the IBAN structure, specified to-be changes of payment formats used in payment systems, and developed a number of necessary materials.
Transition to the IBAN structure of accounts will be implemented in the following several stages:
- Preparatory stage of transition to the IBAN, which has already begun (in the early 2011),
- The application of the IBAN on correspondent accounts of banks,
- The application of the IBAN on clients' accounts and their parallel use with the previous accounts,
- Refusal from the old-style accounts and the complete transition to the IBAN approximately by September 2012
The IBAN structure of payments the working group has adopted has the following structure:
2 symbols: country code for the Azerbaijan Republic (AZ)
2 symbols: control number
4 symbols: initial 4 symbols of SWIFT BIC of a financial institution
20 symbols: client's account number. If the number of symbols in client's account number of smaller than 20, the account number shall be preceded by zeros