Banks and other financial institutions in the country will start the process of migrating to IBAN format for bank accounts, a standard that will allow Costa Ricans to make national and international transactions with the same bank number.
The Central Bank expects users are not affected by any inconvenience, as it is only an extension to the number they already have.
The IBAN will reduce errors in processing incoming and outgoing payments in financial institutions, since each user’s account will be unique worldwide and verification codes will be incorporated to guarantee that its structure is correct.
The IBAN account is obtained by adding five characters to the client’s account: they refer to the country code (CR), a verification code (two calculated digits) and a zero (0). The verification code will check, through an algorithm, that all the numbers in the account are correct.
This will allow users to make transactions in 70 countries using the same format.