SEPA coverage · 🇻🇦 VA

Convert Vatican City IBANs to their BIC

Every Vatican City IBAN is 22 characters long and starts with VA. The bank identifier embedded inside it is what resolves to a BIC/SWIFT code, the bank's name and address, and its SEPA reachability.

22
IBAN length
characters, fixed
VA
Country code
ISO 3166-1
EUR
Currency
eurozone account
18
Structure
BBAN characters after the check digits

The Vatican City IBAN format

Example of a valid Vatican City IBAN:

VA59 0011 2300 0012 3456 78

Structure of a Vatican City IBAN, segment by segment
Segment Length Example Meaning
Country code2VAAlways VA
Check digits259ISO 7064 mod-97 checksum over the whole IBAN
Bank code3001Numeric code identifying the Vatican institution
Account number15123000012345678Numeric account identifier

Vatican City is the newest SEPA member, admitted in 2019. Its IBANs are issued by the Istituto per le Opere di Religione and follow a simple 3-digit bank code structure.

How to get the BIC from a Vatican City IBAN

01

Validate the IBAN

Check the length (exactly 22 characters for VA) and the ISO 7064 mod-97 checksum. Both are local computations — no lookup needed yet.

02

Extract the bank identifier

The bank code (3 characters) inside the BBAN identifies the institution holding the account.

03

Resolve it to a BIC

Map the bank identifier to the institution's BIC via registry data — or send the IBAN to the API and get BIC, bank details and SEPA flags in one response.

Resolve it with one API call

Send the IBAN to POST /v1/convert and get back the BIC, bank details and the four SEPA reachability flags. Invalid and not-found lookups are always free.

curl https://api.iban2bic.com/v1/convert \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ibk_live_xxx" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "iban": "VA59001123000012345678" }'

Vatican City IBAN — frequently asked

Other SEPA countries

Keep reading

Resolve Vatican City IBANs programmatically

BIC, bank details and SEPA reachability for any VA IBAN — €0.009 per successful call, failures always free.