Blog
Practical notes on IBANs, payments and test data, for the people who build and test payment flows. New articles every week, from the Generate Random IBAN editorial team.
- Real IBANs in test data: the GDPR risk and what to use instead A customer's IBAN in a staging database is personal data processed for a purpose nobody collected it for. This post reads the relevant GDPR articles with an engineer's eye and compares the practical alternatives: masking, pseudonymisation, synthetic data and generated IBANs. Read article
- IBAN vs routing number: what US teams need to know before paying a European supplier The US identifies a bank account with a routing number and an account number. Europe and about 90 other countries use the IBAN. This guide covers the differences, what to request from a supplier abroad, and the validation rules for each field. Read article
- Verification of Payee in the EU: what developers need to know The EU name-and-IBAN check that euro-area banks have run since 9 October 2025: the legal text, the EPC scheme that implements it, the four outcomes, and what changes for the people who build payment flows and test data. Read article
- Why a valid IBAN can still be rejected: what the check digits do and do not prove A valid IBAN is a well-formed string, nothing more. Here is what the check digits prove, what they cannot, and the reasons banks give when a payment to a valid IBAN comes back. Read article
- How to test IBAN validation: a QA checklist with real test cases What to feed an IBAN validator before you trust it: one valid IBAN per country, the failures it must catch, the input it must tolerate, and where the test data comes from. Read article
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