BIC is an international standard for identification of institutions within the financial services industry. BICs are used in automated processing to unambiguously identify a financial or non-financial institution. The ISO 9362 standard specifies the elements and the structure of a BIC as either eight or eleven contiguous characters. These characters comprise either the first three, or all four, of the following components: party prefix, country code, party suffix, and branch identifier. The International Organization for Standardization has designated SWIFT as the BIC registration authority. |