Cheque and Credit Clearing Company is the appointed clearance organisations in the UK.
The current standard is ISO 13616:2007, which indicates SWIFT as the formal registrar.
It was originally adopted by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS), and later adopted as an international standard under ISO 13616:1997. The site contains over 500 banks with 26,000 sortcodes.
To overcome these difficulties, the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) developed the IBAN which was later adopted as an international standard under ISO 13616:1997. In particular, the computer program that accepts an IBAN will be able to validate:
Is the country code valid?