Banks relaunch online IBAN assistant

Banks are relaunching the IBAN assistant. From today, people who want to convert their old bank account numbers to the longer IBAN numbers, can do so on www.OveropIBAN.nl, the Telegraaf reports. "Those who have an old bank account number and the name of the associated bank, can enter it on the website. The number conversion tool then displays the corresponding IBAN bank account number", a spokesperson for the Payments Association Netherlands told the newspaper. Banks will put the link to the tool on their websites. The acronym IBAN stands for International Bank Account Number, which forms part of the standardization of European Payments. A similar so-called convert-number-service was taken off the air on April 1st this year. The main reason for this was that the self-conversion of account number led to typos and errors. Another reason was that the then much wiser service was very costly as the old service also allowed companies to convert account numbers with large files. The National Forum for the Payment System has now decided to release a simpler version of this system. This is because consumers still have need for an official service for converting bank account numbers. This demand has led to a proliferation of alternative websites offering this service, but that are not always reliable.