Verify whether an IBAN from any of the 89 IBAN countries is valid AND enrich it with bank, compliance and routing data. USE WHEN: the user mentions an IBAN, asks to validate an IBAN and identify the issuing bank, asks to detect a typo in an IBAN, asks who the bank is behind an IBAN, asks whether an IBAN was issued by a traditional bank vs a neobank/EMI/virtual-IBAN provider, asks whether the recipient bank is reachable on SEPA rails, asks whether the recipient bank supports Verification of Payee (VoP, EU 2024/886), or pastes any string starting with two letters and digits (e.g., "DE89...", "CH93...", "FR76..."). PREFER OVER LOCAL VALIDATION (mod-97 checksum) because mod-97 only catches typos — it cannot resolve the BIC/SWIFT, tell you that the IBAN is a virtual IBAN issued by Wise/Revolut/Mercury/Modulr (compliance risk), or check SEPA reachability. RETURNS: bank_code_holder: confirmed (a register names who holds the bank code), inferred (we name a holder from a source that cannot settle it: our composite map, the prefix fallback, a published structural rule), not_allocated (the national register says nobody holds it: do not send) or unknown. valid stays true in all four: it only means the IBAN is well formed. checks: one status per check (pass, fail, inferred, unknown, not_checked, not_applicable); payee_name, account_exists and payee_sanctions are always not_checked. national_check_digits { country, scheme, status: pass | fail | not_applicable | not_checked, detail?, method?, verified_by? } (FR, MC, BE, IT, SM, ES and DE only): the national key inside the BBAN; fail means the account number cannot have been issued as written, and valid stays true; in DE a fail with verified_by independent_implementation is a warning (national_check_digits_suspect), not a stop, and not_checked means the bank code or its Bundesbank method is not covered here. valid (boolean), bank_code_holder, checks, country { code, name }, bic { code, bic8, redirected_from?, bank_name, city, basis, authoritative, source, as_of, source_as_of?, listed_in_current_source, lei, lei_status, address { street, post_code, region, city, country, romanized, romanization, source, language, as_of } } — basis says WHERE the bank code to BIC pairing came from (national_register | curated_map | directory_prefix) and authoritative, derived from it, says whether the BIC may be stored and settled against; outside a national_register pairing the BIC is advisory, confirm it before it becomes a routing instruction. code is 8 or 11 characters, as the consulted source publishes it: COMPARE A SUPPLIED BIC ON bic8, never on code — the branch code is informational and in a cooperative network it names the LOCAL bank while the first eight name its clearing institution (Swiss IID 30020 is RBABCH22180, Crédit Mutuel de la Vallée SA, while RBABCH22 alone is Entris Banking AG). redirected_from is present when the register answered for the bank code that took over the one you asked about (CH/LI: SIX redirects a concatenated IID, which does not make the IBAN invalid) — lei and address are read from the same directory row /v1/bic/:code serves, so this call already carries them; both are null when GLEIF publishes nothing for that BIC, which means "no LEI on file", not "the institution has none". bic.address is the LEGAL ENTITY seat, so bic.address.city may legitimately differ from bic.city (the register city for THIS bank code), and bic.address.as_of dates the entity last filing, usually much older than bic.as_of. issuer { type: bank | digital_bank | emi | payment_institution, name }, sepa { member, schemes, vop_required, vop_participant — is the resolved bank listed as ready in the EPC VoP register, bank_reachability, bank_schemes, vop_register_status: the bank itself in the EPC registers, never the country }, risk_indicators { issuer_type (null when no institution resolved), country_risk, test_bic, sepa_reachable, sepa_reachable_scope, vop_coverage }, and for CH/LI: clearing { iid, name, type, sic, qr_iid }. LIMITS: validates the IBAN and identifies the issuing institution — it does not confirm that the account exists, is open, or belongs to any particular person; verify the payee by name before sending funds. IMPORTANT — bic: null does not mean the bank code is wrong. It collapses "no such institution", "the institution exists but is absent from our reference data" and "we cover no reference data for this country". Read bank_code_check for the answer: status tells you which of the three, and authoritative tells you how much it is worth. Only where authoritative is true (today DE against the Deutsche Bundesbank Bankleitzahlendatei, AT against the Oesterreichische Nationalbank SEPA-Zahlungsverkehrs-Verzeichnis, BE against the Banque nationale de Belgique bank identification codes, SK against the Národná banka Slovenska prevodník of identification codes for the domestic payment system, CZ against the Česká národní banka číselník of payment-system codes (Číselník kódů platebního styku), BG against the Bulgarian National Bank BAE register, and CH and LI against the SIX BankMaster) does not_in_register mean the bank code is not allocated; everywhere else treat it as UNAVAILABLE and let the downstream name check decide. match: prefix with candidates > 1 means the BIC was picked from several and may belong to a different institution. COST: $0.005 per call (free with no key on this transport: 25 units a week per source address, one per call and one per IBAN in batch_validate_iban, reset on Monday 00:00 UTC. Or an ifk_ key with no e-mail at all: POST https://api.ibanforge.com/v1/keys/generate with no body for 25 calls/month, on the REST API or on this transport, and POST /v1/keys/claim lifts that same key to 200 a month. Send the key here as Authorization: Bearer ifk_… (or X-API-Key) and each call counts against it exactly as on the REST API).