The European Payments Council (EPC) has published today a list of standard test cases consisting of reference IBANs, the Bank Identification Codes (IBAN-prefixes) and the corresponding Account Holding BICs. 

In the EPC Verification Of Payee (VOP) scheme, reachability of Payment Service Providers (PSPs) and correctly routing VOP Requests between PSPs are crucial factors for successful operations of the scheme. A Requesting PSPs, or its Routing and/or Verification Mechanism (RVM) acting on its behalf, will need to correctly derive the Account Holding BIC from the beneficiary’s IBAN entered by the payer, in order to identify the correct VOP Responding PSP for this IBAN and be able to fetch the connectivity details from the EPC Directory Service (EDS). 

To support all stakeholders in the VOP scheme (PSPs, RVMs, Directory Service Providers, IT service providers) to implement and test this important functionality in their VOP processes, the EPC has compiled a list of standard test cases consisting of reference IBANs, the Bank Identification Codes (IBAN-prefixes) and the corresponding Account Holding BICs. 

The test cases cover the different countries in the European Economic Area (EEA). The test set can be used by any stakeholder in the VOP Scheme to verify if their mapping solution returns the same expected BIC for the given IBAN. 

Due to data privacy concerns, the test list only provides masked IBANs; to enable users to validate the test cases with actual test IBANs, the Excel sheet includes a simple IBAN generator.

The test cases were compiled from various sources and use existing Bank Identification Codes and BICs. Preference was given to test data provided by PSPs; other test data was collected in collaboration with major Directory Service Providers or from test accounts publicly available on the internet.

The EPC expects to enrich the file and provide periodic updates here.