How to check an IBAN before you pay an invoice

An invoice gives you an IBAN, and you are about to pay it or add it to a payment run. A mistyped IBAN can bounce days later, and a fraudulent one looks like any other.

Paste it into the IBAN validator: a Valid IBAN verdict rules out a mistyped character and says whether the account is in the SEPA zone. It does not say whose account it is. A whole payment file goes through the same check, up to 200 IBANs at once, with a CSV of the verdicts to keep.

What does a Valid IBAN verdict prove before a payment?

It proves the number is well formed: a country code the validator knows, the length that country sets, and check digits that agree with the rest. Per ISO 7064, the standard behind the check digits, a single mistyped character fails that test, and so does nearly any swap of two neighbouring characters.

The verdict also shows the Country, the Expected length and the SEPA zone. The Printable form groups the IBAN in fours, as it is written on paper, so you can compare it with the invoice group by group.

For the SEPA zone and its neighbours, the Anatomy splits the domestic part into its bank code, account number and, where the country has one, branch code. A bank code that differs from the one on the supplier’s previous invoice points to another bank.

What can’t an IBAN check tell you?

It cannot tell you whether the account exists, or whether it belongs to the supplier named on the invoice. A fraudster’s account has a real IBAN, so it passes every format check.

Business email compromise, a fraud against businesses that pay suppliers by transfer, runs through compromised email accounts and other channels. The FBI’s IC3 counted 24,768 complaints and $3.05 billion in reported losses for it in 2025.

The name is your bank’s check. Since 9 October 2025, payment providers in the euro area must verify, free of charge, that the payee’s name matches the IBAN, according to the European Commission.

How do I check every IBAN in a payment file?

Paste the file’s IBAN column into Several IBANs at once, one IBAN per line, and press Verify. Up to 200 lines go through at once. A longer list is refused with its count, as in “At most 200 lines are taken at once, and this text has 201.”

Bullets and numbering at the start of a line are dropped. While this field is filled, the fields above it are ignored.

How do I read the verdicts of a payment file?

A tally above the table, such as “3 of 7 valid.”, says how many lines passed. The rows keep the order you pasted: # is the line number, Pasted the line as you gave it, and IBAN the verdict, with the printable form when valid.

Country and SEPA are filled for valid rows only; SEPA is ticked for an account in the SEPA zone. A refused row states its Reason instead: “The mod-97 check digits do not match.” for a mistyped digit, “Expected length for DE: 22 (received: 21).” for a missing one.

The batch proposes no correction. Paste a refused IBAN into the IBAN field on its own to get Did you mean, then confirm the right candidate against the supplier’s own documents.

What does the CSV download contain?

Download as CSV returns one row per pasted line, with seven columns: position, input, valid, iban, country, sepa and reason. The iban column holds each valid IBAN without spaces, and valid and sepa read true or false. The position column matches each verdict to its line in the payment file.

Questions

Is my payment file stored when I check it?

No. The validator’s page states that what you paste is checked and forgotten, and the CSV download posts the list again rather than writing it into a web address.

Does the check give me the supplier’s bank name or BIC?

No. For the SEPA zone and its neighbours, the verdict shows the bank code inside the Anatomy, but never the bank’s name or its BIC.

Can I check the IBAN straight from a PDF invoice?

Copy it from the PDF and paste it as it is: the validator ignores spaces, dashes and dots, and accepts lower case.

Sources and further reading

• FBI IC3 Annual Report 2025 — 24,768 business email compromise complaints and $3,046,598,558 in reported losses in 2025.
• European Commission — free payee verification in the euro area from 9 October 2025.