"IBAN Name Check API: Validate IBANs & Catch Fraud with Fuzzy Name Matching"

2026-02-28 [iban payments fraud kyc api eu]

We just launched the IBAN Name Check API — a free, open developer tool for validating IBANs, extracting bank metadata, and performing fuzzy name matching to help prevent Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud.

What It Does

The API covers three core use cases:

1. IBAN Validation (POST /iban/validate)
Full checksum verification using the MOD-97 algorithm, country format rules for 79 countries, and automatic BIC/bank identification for 66 major European banks.

POST /iban/validate
{ "iban": "DE89 3704 0044 0532 0130 00" }

→ {
  "valid": true,
  "iban_formatted": "DE89 3704 0044 0532 0130 00",
  "country": "DE",
  "country_name": "Germany",
  "bic": "COBADEFFXXX",
  "bank_name": "Commerzbank",
  "bank_city": "Frankfurt"
}

2. Name Check (POST /iban/name-check)
Compare a payee name against a known account holder name using Jaro-Winkler similarity + token overlap. Returns a confidence score (0–1) and a label: exact, close, partial, weak, or no_match.

POST /iban/name-check
{ "iban": "GB29NWBK60161331926819", "name": "John Smith", "reference_name": "Jon Smith" }

→ {
  "name_check": {
    "score": 0.973,
    "label": "exact",
    "explanation": "Very high similarity — likely same entity"
  }
}

3. Bank Directory (GET /iban/banks)
Search 66 banks by country, name, or BIC. Useful for BIC lookups and integration testing.

Why It Matters

APP fraud — where victims are tricked into sending money to fraudulent accounts — is a £500M+ annual problem in the UK alone. The EU's Instant Payments Regulation now mandates name-check verification for SEPA Credit Transfers. Commercial APIs for this capability charge €0.10–0.50 per call.

This tool covers the validation and fuzzy matching layer for free.

Try It

Interactive playground: /iban
API docs (Swagger UI): /iban/docs
OpenAPI spec: /iban/openapi.yaml

No auth. No rate limits (for now). No tracking.

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