Azerbaijan, Baku, April 16 /Trend I.Khalilova/
The Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) has postponed until the end of 2012 the total period of transition in interbank settlements to any intra and client accounts to the new structure of accounts which is a standard bank account number (IBAN), the Central Bank told Trend on Monday.
"According to the plans, the full transition to the IBAN structure was envisaged at the beginning of September 2012 However, taking into account the feasibility of the project in parallel with that of introducing of a new chart of accounts in the banking system, this time has been moved to the end of 2012," the CBA said.
Use of structure of correspondent and sub correspondent accounts of banks, opened by the Central Bank in commercial banks for the purpose of intra settlement transactions has already begun since March 12.
IBAN is a banking account number set up to conform with the international standard ISO 13616, which was specified by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) and the International Standardisation Organization (ISO), and shall be issued by financial institutions to their clients.
The principle objectives are the sophistication of the banking client identification process in the sphere of electronic payments, the upgrading of the automation level in payment processing and the elimination of the current system's scattered nature.
To accomplish this goal, a working group of representatives of the CBA, Tax Ministry, Finance Ministry, State Social Protection Fund, the Association of Banks of Azerbaijan and commercial banks including the International Bank of Azerbaijan, Kapital Bank, Standard Bank, Unibank, Bank Respublika and Mugan Bank was established on June 17, 2010.
The working group determined the IBAN structure; specified the necessary changes of payment formats used in payment systems and developed a number of required materials.
Transition to the IBAN structure of accounts will be implemented in the following several stages:
- Preparatory stage of transition to the IBAN, which already began in early 2011,
- The application of the IBAN on correspondent accounts of banks,
- The application of the IBAN on client accounts and their parallel use with the previous accounts,
- Refusal from the old style accounts and the complete transition to the IBAN approximately by September 2012
The IBAN structure of payments the working group has adopted has the following structure:
2 symbols: country code for the Azerbaijan Republic (AZ)
2 symbols: control number
4 symbols: initial 4 symbols of SWIFT BIC of a financial institution
20 symbols: client's account number. If the number of symbols in client's account number of smaller than 20, the account number shall be preceded by zeros.