Virtual IBAN: What it Means and How it Benefits Your Business

The Role of Traditional IBANs in Global Payments

For over 20 years, traditional IBAN accounts (International Bank Account Number) have helped to standardise cross-border payments for businesses worldwide. An IBAN’s alphanumeric character string enables banking systems to identify and route payments to a designated country, bank, and branch of a physical bank.

Virtual IBANs serve to remove administrative obstacles, occasional mix-ups and delays especially in the realm of online businesses with many underlying customers and suppliers. Additionally, virtual IBANs offer an automated, faster, safer, and less costly alternative for businesses to assign payments to specific counterparties within an organisation.

Simplified Account Management for Businesses

A virtual IBAN, when linked to a main account, acts as a reference number that helps reroute incoming payments to a client or supplier within a physical bank account within Bivial. As a corporate client of Bivial, virtual IBANs will enable you to allocate separate accounts to your customers and automatically route them to a master banking account. For example, after opening an account with Bivial and you are assigned an IBAN, you can use this to create individual Virtual IBANs or quasi sub-accounts for your clients. Each client makes payments into their assigned IBAN and the funds are rerouted into the master banking account, making for easier payment settlement and reconciliation.

Enhanced Security and Regulatory Compliance

Virtual IBANs also provide better security and transparency for payments, as they are cloud-encrypted with a low risk of downtime or fraud. Lastly, they help businesses align with Know Your Customers (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations due to the high-level transparency they offer.

The Bottom Line
A Virtual IBAN offers a payment solution that boosts your processes and provides maximum efficiency for your business. Want to set up a virtual IBAN? Get in touch with a member of the team at Bivial to find out more.