RF creditor reference

The format is short: the letters RF, two check digits and up to 21 characters the issuer picks freely. The check digits use the same modulo 97 scheme as IBAN, so a mistyped character is caught by the payer's bank. The European Payments Council adopted it in the SEPA rulebooks as the Structured Creditor Reference.

It exists because every country had built its own reference system. Sweden has the OCR number, Finland its reference number, Belgium its structured communication and Norway KID. Each works fine at home and degrades into free text the moment a payment crosses a border. Finland has gone furthest in switching to RF. Elsewhere it is mostly known as the odd line on a foreign invoice that someone tries to paste into the domestic reference field.