Overview

Business Identifier Code (BIC)

The BIC is the mostly used international identifier of financial institutions. Up to now SWIFT has issued up to 90.000 BICs world-wide. SWIFT in its role of ISO registration authority issues BICs to financial and non-financial institutions connected to the SWIFT network as well as to non-connected institutions. The BIC is used in financial transactions, client and counterparty data bases, compliance documents and many others. The ISO 9362 standard defines the BIC structure.

BIC Policy

This document provides a general description of the rules related to the registration and the publication of BICs. It also provides guidelines for the use of BIC as identifiers and addresses within the SWIFT messaging services.

See the BIC Policy.

Non-SWIFT BIC (BIC1) quality improvement programme

The quality and reliability of the data published in the different SWIFT Directories is key to the SWIFT user community. To this purpose, SWIFT is implementing a quality check process applying to all non-SWIFT BICs (BIC1) to preserve the value of the Directories. The process steps are :

• With the assistance of AVOX, SWIFT monitors all changes of information such as trading status, name and address for every non-SWIFT BIC (BIC1).
• Updates to the BIC data are published through the normal cycle in the different Directories.
• If a BIC identifies an Entity that is no longer in business, SWIFT lists the BIC in a specific file on swift.com for a period of 3 months. This 3 month period enables the financial community to update the different systems containing this information. During this period, any institution that is still using such a BIC as reference may contact SWIFT (e2e-reference-data.generic@swift.com) to provide additional information or to extend its publication.
• Without feedback, the related BIC is 'deleted' from the SWIFT Directories through the normal publication cycle.