United States Of America (usa): SWIFT/BIC Codes & Payment Info

The currency of the United States is the US dollar (USD), the world's primary reserve currency and the dominant unit for global trade invoicing, commodity pricing and cross-border settlement. The dollar floats freely and is fully convertible: the United States imposes no exchange or capital controls, accepted IMF Article VIII obligations in 1946, and has no repatriation or surrender requirements. The United States does not use IBAN. To route an inbound payment you need the beneficiary bank's SWIFT BIC and the beneficiary's account number, plus the nine-digit ABA routing number (RTN) for domestic routing; for USD clearing through CHIPS a four-digit CHIPS participant code may also be quoted. The United States is not part of SEPA, which is a euro-area scheme.

The United States is the center of global USD clearing, and virtually every international dollar payment ultimately settles through the US banking system. Large-value payments settle in central bank money over Fedwire, the Federal Reserve's real-time gross settlement system, while CHIPS, operated by The Clearing House, nets and settles most cross-border USD payments among its member banks. Inbound cross-border payments arrive by SWIFT and then settle domestically over these rails. Messaging is now ISO 20022: Fedwire completed its migration in July 2025 and the SWIFT cross-border CBPR+ coexistence period closed in November 2025. For lower-value and instant flows the United States runs FedNow and the private RTP network, both around-the-clock instant services, alongside the ACH batch system. To credit a beneficiary without delay an instruction typically needs:

• the ordering customer in field 50 (account number, full name without initials, and address);
• the beneficiary in field 59 (account number, full name without initials, and address);
• the beneficiary bank in field 57 (its SWIFT BIC, with the ABA routing number or CHIPS participant code where available).

The United States has no purpose-of-payment code requirement for cross-border transfers, so the SWIFT BIC is the key routing identifier and the account number with the ABA routing number identifies the account. Using a beneficiary's initials instead of the full registered name, or omitting the routing number, is a common cause of delay. Because the United States is itself the USD clearing hub, inbound dollars to a US account need no external correspondent chain and typically credit the same day, while a US payer's foreign-currency leg instead clears through that currency's home market. The routing choice, not access to the country, is usually what drives cost and cut-off times.

On compliance, the United States is a founding FATF member and sits on neither the FATF grey nor black list; its fifth-round mutual evaluation is underway in 2026, with the on-site assessment taking place during the year and the report expected later in the year. Unusually, the United States is not a CRS jurisdiction: it has not adopted the OECD Common Reporting Standard and instead exchanges financial-account information under FATCA through a network of intergovernmental agreements. Anti-money-laundering rules rest on the Bank Secrecy Act, administered by FinCEN, the US financial intelligence unit, with a USD 10,000 currency-transaction reporting threshold and travel-rule recordkeeping from USD 3,000. Sanctions are administered by the Treasury's OFAC, which runs one of the world's most extensive programs, implements UN measures and applies secondary sanctions with extraterritorial reach; comprehensive US programs cover Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and the occupied regions of Ukraine, and major banks in those jurisdictions are designated, so screen counterparties before you pay.

Cryptoassets are legal in the United States and treated as property for federal tax purposes rather than legal tender, and there is no federal ban on using them for payment. The framework is forming quickly: the GENIUS Act, enacted in 2025, created the first federal regime for payment stablecoins, with implementing rules from the OCC and other regulators being finalized through 2026 and the framework taking effect in stages into 2027. A broader market-structure bill, the CLARITY Act, which would divide oversight of digital assets between the CFTC and the SEC, passed the House in 2025 and remains before the Senate as of mid-2026. Crypto-asset businesses register with FinCEN as money services businesses and are licensed largely at state level, for example under New York's virtual-currency regime and state money-transmitter licences, while federally chartered banks may custody crypto and handle stablecoins under OCC guidance. The United States has chosen not to issue a central bank digital currency: a January 2025 executive order prohibits a Federal Reserve CBDC, and policy favours regulated private stablecoins instead.