Financial institutions are identified by unique ISO Bank Identifier Codes (BICs). BICs are published in the SWIFT BIC Directory. The first 8 characters of the SWIFT BIC are made up as follows:
The Bank Code (4 upper-case alphabetic characters) identifies the financial institution
The Country Code (2 upper-case alphabetic characters), which is the ISO Country Code, identifies the country or geographical territory in which the user is located.
The Location Code (2 upper-case alphanumeric characters) identifies, within a country or geographical territory, the region and/or city in which the user is located.
Non-SWIFT BICs are identified by a '1' in the 8th position. They are validated in the same way as SWIFT BICs in the text of the message. The system will, however, reject a message with a non-SWIFT BIC in the header.
In addition, an optional 3-character Branch Code may be used to identify any branch of a user institution. If no Branch Code is defined, a default of 'XXX' is used for addressing purposes.
