Originally Posted by
zilliontw
3 weeks later or so I received an email acknowleding the refund and the agent asked for my bank details with IBAN or BIC number - this is where the hell broke loose!!
I haven't heard neither of these names and after some research and consulting with my bank, I came to conclusion that BIC is the same as SWIFT we call it here.
Just for matter of completeness: BIC stands for Business Identifier Codes, aka SWIFT-BIC, BIC code, SWIFT ID or SWIFT code.
IBAN stands for International Bank Account Number.
For both of them are rather good explanations in wikipedia available:
BIC and
IBAN.
From the IBAN article:
Banks in the United States do not provide IBAN format account numbers. Any adoption of the IBAN standard by U.S. banks would likely be initiated by ANSI ASC X9, the U.S. financial services standards development organization but to date it has not done so. Hence payments to U.S. bank accounts from outside the U.S. are prone to errors of routing.
So, if you are US located, then the money just could not be transferred, because the your account number is not compatible to the IBAN standard (which is a ISO standard to be precise). Regardless of the Thalys issues, I assume that you have to blame the (US) banks for that.