The BIC Policy: Clear rules for registration and usage of BICsSWIFT responds to community call for improving the identification of institutionsPublished on November 20, 2009
The financial crisis and its consequences have raised questions about entity identification in general and the use of BICs in particular.
| SWIFT is the designated ISO registration authority for BIC |
| The ISO standard 9362 has now been extended to include financial and non-financial institutions. The BIC provides an identifier for institutions within the financial services industry to facilitate automated processing of telecommunication messages in banking and related financial transaction environments. |
To address the challenges and to make it easier for you, SWIFT has published the rules for registration and usage of BICs in the BIC Policy.
The BIC Policy consolidates all existing rules about BIC registration and usage in one reference document to facilitate consultation and compliance with the rules.
In parallel, we are launching an awareness and information gathering campaign to spread the knowledge about the BIC Policy and to collect additional information from the community about all registered BICs.
Over time, institutions have registered one or more BICs for different operational or organisational purposes. From a community perspective, this means that one institution is not always identified by a single identifier.
You have asked us to improve the identification of institutions using multiple BIC. As a result of your feedback, we plan to include and publish additional attributes for every BIC record (such as legal name, registered address and unique BIC). The enriched directories will be deployed during 2010.
Concretely, in the coming weeks, you will receive a form with your institution's BIC data. We count on you to complete it with the additional information.
As a member of the global SWIFT community, you will benefit from the enrichment of the SWIFT Directories that will facilitate effective counterparty identification and the subsequent exposure and credit risk management.
The BIC Policy consolidates all existing rules about BIC registration and usage in one reference document.
We are launching an awareness and information gathering campaign to spread the knowledge about the BIC Policy and to collect additional information.
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