The Indiepinion

All that was left for me to be fully registered with Apple to receive money was to enter my bank account into iTunes Connect. However iTunes Connect refused to accept my IBAN, telling me it’s invalid. Since i’ve opened a new bank account on the same day i thought it was simply because my account was so brand new.

But as a matter of fact, other people seem to have the very same problem. After researching it a bit more i found nothing but cryptic comments, the best was that it could be resolved by adding missing zeros. So i tried all kinds of things with my IBAN without any luck, thinking it may simply not appreciate my german IBAN for some reason. But iTunes Connect was persistant that my IBAN is invalid even though IBAN checking programs all concluded that the IBAN is correct for my country, and i got the IBAN from the IBAN calculator of my bank. So what was going on here?

The answer is simple: the IBAN is indeed correct but the bank account number i entered was missing the leading zeros that do appear in the IBAN!

So, for example if your Bank Account number is 123456 then the IBAN for a german bank account will look something like this: DE60 55599900 0000123456

Since german bank account numbers can have up to 10 digits, those 10 digits are reserved in the IBAN and filled with leading zeros if your bank account number has less than 10 digits. In this example case, what you have to do in order for iTunes Connect to accept your bank account & IBAN number, is to enter your bank account number with the correct amount of leading zeros! It’s not the IBAN that is incorrect, it’s the bank account number!

In this example you would simply have to enter 0000123456 as your bank account number instead of just 123456 in order for iTunes Connect to accept your IBAN. The message that the IBAN is invalid is misleading because it’s actually your bank account number missing the leading zeros that appear in the IBAN.

I hope this helps people who have the same issue with iTunes Connect. Please leave me a comment and place a link if you had the same problem, i suspect there are many with that exact issue. It’s not limited to german IBANs by the way, other countries just have longer or shorter IBANs and in turn a different maximum of digits that can appear in a bank account number. You can look up how the IBAN for your country should look like on Wikipedia.

Auf deutsch: falls iTunes Connect deine IBAN nicht akzeptiert und meint, sie sei ungültig, dann liegt das womöglich an fehlenden, führenden Nullen vor der Bankkonto Nummer! Es ist also nicht die IBAN die nicht korrekt ist, sondern die Kontonummer der Bank muss im Eingabefeld mit führenden Nullen eingetragen werden, so das sie exakt 10 Stellen aufweist (für ein deutsches Bankkonto).

Also, nicht iTunes Connect glauben das die IBAN fehlerhaft oder inkorrekt sei, sondern die Bankkonto Nummer überprüfen ob sie tatsächlich 10 Stellen hat, und wenn sie weniger als 10 Stellen hat diese mit führenden Nullen auffüllen, z.b. so: 0000123456

Und bevor jemand frägt: ja, das ist korrekt. Man kann seine Bankkonto Nummer überall so schreiben wenn man das möchte. Nur normalerweise lässt man die führenden Nullen der Einfachheit halber weg, deswegen ist es den wenigsten bekannt das dies funktioniert. Entsprechend oft scheinen Apple Entwickler bei der Eingabe der Bankverbindung auf iTunes Connect genau auf dieses Problem zu stossen.

Bitte hinterlasst mir eine Nachricht und verlinkt diese Seite wenn euch das geholfen hat. Das würde mich freuen!