English: A typical (fictitious) British bank statement showing the location of the IBAN. The statement header itself is based on the headers used by Lloyds Bank and the Halifax - two well-known British banks. The first four characters of the IBAN contain the same information for all countries: characters 1 and 2 of the IBAN identify the country where the bank is based (in this case "GB" = "Great Britain") and characters 3 and 4 contain the IBAN checksum. The information contained in subsequent characters varies from country to country. In the case of British IBANs characters 5 to 8 are the bank's BIC code, characters 9 to 14 of the IBAN contain the sort code and characters 15 to 22 contain the account number.