Primary Account Number

The Primary Account Number ( PAN ) uniquely identifies credit cards and debit cards ; it is a payment card number.

The PAN is encoded on track 2 of a credit / debit card.

use

When paying with a card, the PAN is read out, along with other information; this can be converted into the country, credit institution, bank code and account number with the help of databases. The PAN is printed on card payment receipts. Often some of the PAN digits are replaced by x. This is called PAN truncation.

construction

ISO / IEC 7812 defines the following structure.

• The first character is a Major Industry Identifier (MII).
• The first six characters are called the Issuer Identification Number (IIN), formerly also known as the Bank Identification Number (BIN). These are awarded by the American Bankers Association (ABA).
• The last character is a check digit, calculated with the Luhn algorithm .
• The total length is up to 19 characters.

The IIN of the German debit cards start with 672, the IIN of the savings bank cards with 59.

For German debit cards, the coding of the PAN is as follows:

672	German debit card prefix
ppppp	five-digit institute number
kkkkkkkkkk	ten-digit account number
z	Check digit

Institute number

The central associations of the banking industry and the Deutsche Bundesbank have specified a separate numbering system for international card payments using bank cards; then the card-issuing bank receives a five-digit bank number.

Award and appearance

The institute number has five digits. The first digit is the institute group number, the following four digits can be freely chosen by the institutions. The member institutions of the Bundesverband deutscher Banken eV and the offices of the Deutsche Bundesbank have the institute group number 2. For the others it is the fourth digit of their bank code.

The Bundesbank has a current list of bank codes and the associated PAN available for download. Each institute number is assigned to exactly one bank code, the reverse does not apply. There is no way to convert the 5-digit bank number and the 8-digit bank code into one another.

See also

• Debit card
• ISO 7810

Web links

Wiktionary: bank code  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• Bank code search at the Deutsche Bundesbank
• Bank sort code files of the Deutsche Bundesbank for download

Individual evidence

1. ↑ acertigo.de glossary  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 78 kB)  
2. ↑ page 15 Federal Office for Information Security
3. ↑ currency-iso.org  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ ^{a b} "Bank Code Guideline - Status: January 8, 2007" Publisher: Bundesbank (archive snapshot from Jan 2012)
5. ↑ Download - bank codes. In: Deutsche Bundesbank . Retrieved November 20, 2018 .