In fintech, innovation often shows up as something big—new rails, new currencies, new embedded-banking stacks. But occasionally, the most effective ideas are deceptively simple. Swiss fintech Bivial AG has launched one of those ideas: Personalised IBANs, a feature that lets businesses reserve branded Swiss account numbers instead of settling for the standard soup of digits.

Think of it as the banking equivalent of securing a vanity license plate—or nabbing the perfect domain name before anyone else does.

Instead of the familiar numeric string, such as:
CH93 8304 103400 4321 6789 0

A business could receive payments using something like:
CH13 83041 0010000 TECHGURU

Yes, a literal branded IBAN—legible, unmistakable, and tied directly to your company’s identity.

Banking Details as Branding Real Estate

It’s a surprisingly intuitive idea when you pause to think about it. Bank details appear everywhere: invoices, contracts, vendor agreements, subscription forms, payout requests, and every other document involving a flow of money.

“Every time a client pays you, they’re interacting with your brand,” said Martynas Bieliauskas, CEO of Bivial. “With Personalised IBANs, we’re making bank details not just functional, but memorable, trustworthy, and uniquely yours.”

For companies obsessed with cleaning up friction in customer journeys, personalized IBANs do more than look good. They reduce confusion, cut human error, and eliminate the “Is this the right account?” anxiety that often triggers manual reviews or slows down B2B payments.

And unlike many modern fintech products, this isn’t a new system or a parallel network. It’s the existing Swiss IBAN framework—just smarter.

Why This Works: The Psychology of Payments

The idea taps into something bigger than vanity: brand recall + financial trust.

When clients see a name they recognize embedded directly into an account number, it:

• Confirms they’re paying the correct business
• Reinforces legitimacy
• Reduces error rates during manual entry
• Leaves a lasting brand impression

It’s not unlike what companies already do in email (custom domains), web presence (unique URLs), and even telephone numbers (mnemonic formats). Payments have simply been the last untouched frontier for personalization.

Bivial’s move suggests that frontier is now open.

A Simple Innovation With Outsized Impact

Bivial highlights four advantages:

1. Brand Visibility

The business name appears on every document, payment method, and workflow step that includes the IBAN. It’s subtle, yet omnipresent—exactly the kind of branding CFOs don’t mind approving.

2. Increased Trust

A branded IBAN reads like a direct confirmation stamp. In industries with high invoice fraud or spoofing attempts, seeing the company name in the number itself adds a layer of confidence.

3. Fewer Costly Errors

Long numeric IBANs are notoriously error-prone when keyed in manually. Alphanumeric formats are easier to parse, easier to memorize, and harder to misread.

4. Premium & Memorable

Swiss financial identity carries global weight. A Swiss-branded IBAN with your company’s name baked into it feels like a small luxury—and for some, a competitive advantage.

This is the kind of micro-innovation that spreads quickly once early businesses adopt it. Expect to see branded IBANs popping up in tech companies, creative firms, professional services, and high-trust B2B sectors first.

Early Access: Free for Now

For the launch, Bivial is offering free early access to businesses that sign up now—an invitation that almost guarantees initial uptake, especially among startups that understand the value of owning a name early.

And like rare domain names or coveted three-letter license plates, the best personalized IBANs will get snapped up first. There’s a built-in scarcity effect, whether Bivial markets it that way explicitly or not.

The Bigger Picture: Customization Is Eating Financial Infrastructure

Zooming out, Bivial’s move is part of a broader trend shaping fintech: banks and fintechs are racing to personalize infrastructure that used to be purely functional.

• Embedded finance made banking contextual
• API-first models made financial products modular
• Now, branded IBANs make payments personal

It’s the same trajectory we’ve seen in communications and identity tech. Users want function and personality. Businesses want clarity and differentiation. Regulators want stability and auditability.

Personalised IBANs hit that middle ground: the rails stay the same, but the user experience evolves.

A Small Feature That Could Spread Quickly

Fintech history is filled with seemingly minor innovations—interactive statements, dynamic CVVs, branded debit cards—that later became standard because they solved a universal frustration.

Bivial may have introduced one of those ideas.

As fintech competition intensifies and digital businesses look for every edge in trust and user experience, branded IBANs could easily become the norm rather than the novelty. And if that happens, Bivial has positioned itself at the front of the curve.

For now? If your brand name looks good in an IBAN… now’s the time to claim it.