Title: Sort code - Wikipedia
Headings: Sort code
Sort code
Contents
History
List of sort codes of the United Kingdom
Cheque clearing
England and Wales
Scotland
Northern Ireland
Sort codes of the Republic of Ireland
Codes in the 70 range – "walks"
International clearance
See also
Sources
References
External links

Content: Sort code - Wikipedia
Sort code
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Sort codes are the domestic bank codes used to route money transfers between financial institutions in the United Kingdom, and historically in the Republic of Ireland. They are six-digit hierarchical numerical addresses that specify clearing banks, clearing systems, regions, large financial institutions, groups of financial institutions and ultimately resolve to individual branches. In the UK they continue to be used to route transactions domestically within clearance organisations and to identify accounts, while in the Republic of Ireland (a founder member of the Euro) they have been deprecated and replaced by the SEPA systems and infrastructure. Sort codes for Northern Ireland branches of banks (codes beginning with a '9') were registered with the Irish Payment Services Organisation (IPSO) for both Northern Ireland and the Republic. These codes are used in the British clearing system and historically in the Irish system. The sort code is usually formatted as three pairs of numbers, for example 12-34-56. It identifies both the bank (in the first digit or the first two digits) and the branch where the account is held. Sort codes are encoded into IBANs but are not encoded into BICs . Contents
1 History
2 List of sort codes of the United Kingdom
2.1 Cheque clearing
2.2 England and Wales
2.3 Scotland
2.4 Northern Ireland
3 Sort codes of the Republic of Ireland
4 Codes in the 70 range – "walks"
5 International clearance
6 See also
7 Sources
8 References
9 External links
History
Codes began to be used in the early 20th century to facilitate the manual processing of cheques. Known as a 'national code', these had between three and five digits.