SKILL / Business & Risk
Plans: Pro & AgencyBank and Payment Identifiers
Validate supported banking and legal-entity identifiers and explain the associated public institutional information.
Read the step-by-step user guideBank and Payment Identifiers answers two questions about a banking or legal-entity identifier: is it structurally valid, and which institution or registered entity does it publicly refer to? Nexus validates supported identifiers — IBANs, BICs and legal entity identifiers — and explains the public information associated with them, such as the country an IBAN belongs to, the institution and branch a BIC identifies or the registered entity and registration status behind an LEI.
What you get
A validation result for an IBAN, BIC or LEI with the public institution or entity details it points to.
Using Bank and Payment Identifiers in an investigation
The investigator receives a validation result that states whether the identifier’s format and check digits are valid, what its components mean and the public institutional or entity record it refers to, with sources. Where a record is ambiguous or out of date, for example an LEI whose registration has lapsed, Nexus states that plainly. The result never claims that an account exists or that a particular person or company owns it, because validation cannot establish that.
The Skill is most useful when an invoice, contract or payment instruction needs a sanity check: does the bank code match the claimed country and institution, is the LEI current and does its registered name match the counterparty? Results attach to the case, and the institution or entity can be added to the relationship graph and examined further with UK Company Registry, US Public Filings or Sanctions, PEP and Risk Screening.
Example objectives
Run the Skill directly, or describe the objective in your own words — these are the kinds of questions it is built to answer.
Ask Nexus
“Is this IBAN structurally valid, and does its bank code point to an institution in the country the invoice claims?”
Ask Nexus
“Which legal entity is registered under this LEI, is the registration current, and does the name match our counterparty?”
Ask Nexus
“Validate these three BICs and tell me which institutions and branches they identify.”
How Bank and Payment Identifiers fits the investigation
A Skill is one move inside a case. The findings stay in the case file, where the evidence behind them can be checked, graphed and reported.
- 01
Choose or describe
Pick the Skill from the Skill Library, or describe the objective in your own words and let Nexus work out which Skills fit the question.
- 02
Review the evidence
Open the evidence record behind any finding and read the original public source before you rely on what it says.
- 03
Add to the case graph
Promote the people, organizations and identifiers you accept into the case relationship graph, straight from their evidence records.
- 04
Brief and report
Turn the case into a BLUF situation brief and, on Pro and Agency, into a structured PDF report with chain of custody.
Evidence before conclusions
What Bank and Payment Identifiers cannot establish
Nexus keeps supported findings, possible matches, contradictions and information gaps apart instead of blending them into one narrative. These are the boundaries Bank and Payment Identifiers states up front.
- Validation confirms that an identifier is well formed and what it publicly refers to. It does not establish that an account exists, who owns it, its balance or whether a payment is authorized.
- Bank and Payment Identifiers does not perform live bank-account verification. A valid IBAN can still be used in a fraud, and an invalid one may be a typing error rather than deception.
- Public institution and LEI records can lag corporate changes, so the entity behind an identifier is reported as recorded, with its date and source.
Best for
Teams that reach for Bank and Payment Identifiers most often.
Related OSINT concepts
The vocabulary this Skill works in, defined in the glossary.
Related Skills
Skills investigators commonly run next, in the same case.
Frequently asked questions
What does Bank and Payment Identifiers check?
Bank and Payment Identifiers checks supported banking and legal-entity identifiers, including IBANs, BICs and LEIs. For each one, Nexus reports whether the format and check digits are valid, explains the components, such as country code and bank code, and identifies the public institution, branch or registered entity the identifier refers to, with the source and date of that record. Lapsed or ambiguous records are flagged.
Does Bank and Payment Identifiers verify that a bank account exists or who owns it?
Bank and Payment Identifiers validates the identifier and explains what it refers to; it does not contact a bank, confirm that an account is open, check a balance or establish who owns the account. A structurally valid IBAN says only that the number is well formed and points to a recognized institution. Ownership and authorization require a separate, lawful verification outside Nexus.
How does Bank and Payment Identifiers help with invoice fraud?
In an invoice or payment-diversion case, Bank and Payment Identifiers shows whether the IBAN and BIC on the instruction point to the country and institution the supplier claims, and whether the counterparty’s LEI names the same registered entity. A mismatch between the claimed supplier and the institution or entity behind the identifiers is a documented finding for the case, while a match is a consistency check rather than proof of legitimacy.
Which Nexus plan includes Bank and Payment Identifiers?
Bank and Payment Identifiers is included in the Skill Library on the Pro and Agency plans. Pro unlocks 43 of the 47 investigative Skills, including Bank and Payment Identifiers and the other business, financial and risk Skills, and Agency includes all 47.