Financial infrastructure is boring until it breaks. A mistyped IBAN delays a supplier payment by three days. A stale BIC code causes a wire transfer to bounce. A batch of onboarding forms skips validation entirely because calling a third-party service costs too much per request. These are not edge cases — they happen every day, in every fintech, in every back-office.
IBANforge is our answer to that problem.
What is IBANforge?
IBANforge is a developer API for IBAN validation and BIC/SWIFT lookup. It covers 80+ countries, validates structure and checksum (mod-97), parses bank and branch codes from the BBAN, and resolves BIC codes against the 39,000+ entry GLEIF dataset — the same authoritative source used by central banks.
You send a POST request. You get back a clean, structured JSON response. That's it.
{
"iban": "CH9300762011623852957",
"valid": true,
"country": { "code": "CH", "name": "Switzerland" },
"check_digits": "93",
"bban": { "bank_code": "00762", "account_number": "011623852957" },
"formatted": "CH93 0076 2011 6238 5295 7",
"cost_usdc": 0.005,
"bic": { "code": "UBSWCHZH", "bank_name": "UBS Switzerland AG", "city": "Zurich" },
"processing_ms": 9.11
}
Why we built it
Two things converged to make this the right moment.
First, AI agents are now real. Workflows that used to require a human clicking through a banking portal now run autonomously — but only if the underlying tools are trustworthy. An agent that submits invalid IBANs to a payment processor creates real financial errors. Validation needs to happen at the tool level, before any API call to a bank.
Second, x402 micropayments make pay-per-call economics viable. Instead of a monthly subscription that creates friction for small projects and over-charges for occasional use, IBANforge charges fractions of a cent per call in USDC, settled on-chain via the x402 protocol. No signup, no credit card, no rate limits. You pay for what you use, when you use it.
Together, these two shifts — agentic workflows + on-chain micropayments — make a new class of API possible. IBANforge is built for that world.
Key features
IBAN validation across 80+ countries. Full mod-97 checksum verification, country-specific length and format rules, and BBAN parsing to extract bank/branch codes where applicable.
39,000+ BIC entries from GLEIF. The Global LEI Foundation publishes the authoritative mapping of BIC codes to financial institutions. We import it, index it, and serve it with sub-millisecond lookups. Combined IBAN + BIC validation is available in a single request.
MCP integration for AI agents. IBANforge ships with a Model Context Protocol server, meaning any MCP-compatible AI agent can call validate_iban, batch_validate_iban, and lookup_bic as native tools — no custom wrappers needed. Claude, GPT, and open-source agents all speak MCP.
x402 pay-per-call. Single validation: $0.005 USDC. Batch (up to 100): $0.020. BIC lookup: $0.003. No account required. Works with any USDC-capable wallet.
Batch validation. Submit up to 100 IBANs in a single request for bulk onboarding, import flows, or reconciliation jobs.
How to get started
The fastest path is the Playground — paste any IBAN, see the full validation response live, no API key needed.
For integration, the documentation covers every endpoint, request format, response schema, and error code. There is also a free /v1/demo endpoint that returns example responses for a handful of countries so you can test your parser before spending a cent.
# Free demo — no payment required
curl https://api.ibanforge.com/v1/demo
What's next
IBANforge is live and production-ready today. Here is what we are building toward:
- Stripe credits — buy a bundle of credits with a card for teams that prefer traditional billing
- Expanded BIC coverage — enriching entries with institution type, LEI, and correspondent bank data
- Webhook validation — validate IBANs inline during form submission via a lightweight embed
- More MCP tools — currency conversion, SEPA reachability checks, and more financial primitives agents need
If you build something with IBANforge, we want to hear about it. The API is open — no waitlist, no approval process. Start validating.