BICS are allocated for international payment services over the SWIFT network. The BBAN, whose format is decided by the national banking community, includes the domestic bank account number, branch identifier and potentially routing information, the only restrictions being that it must be of fixed length and that only case-insensitive alphanumeric characters are used.
It was originally adopted by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS), and later adopted as an international standard under ISO 13616:1997. Why up-to-date sort code data is important
The sort code data used by the UK payments industry is updated constantly to reflect bank and other financial institution changes.