Bahrain's Central Bank said the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) will be used in the kingdom effective January 2012, to speed up the transaction processes of payments.

The IBAN, an international standard for the numbering of bank customer accounts and accredited by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), would serve customers in the kingdom starting from the end of January 2012, the central bank said in a statement on the state news agency.

The move towards IBAN would express bank customer account numbers in an ISO standard compliant format, the bank said on the BNA website.

'The use of such an internationally accepted format will immensely improve the efficiency of electronic payments and bring a number of benefits to bank customers,' it said.

'Banks will be able to process a transaction efficiently and promptly through processing the IBAN of the recipient and will allow the bank customers to make or receive their payments much faster.'

The number is a way of identifying a bank account which cuts down errors and delays in international payments with a lower risk of propagating transcription errors.

'The adoption of IBAN is a step to increase the efficiency of electronic payments in Bahrain,' said Ahmed Buhijji, director of the Banking Services Directorate at the Central Bank of Bahrain.

Bahrain banks will begin to issue IBAN to their customers in early September 2011. Customers will then be able to use IBAN in making payments from January 31, 2012. 

The IBAN was originally developed to facilitate cross-border payments within the European Union, but the format is increasingly applied globally.-Reuters