Glossary
DEAN
DEAN is the 18-character Digital Euro Account Number — the digital euro's equivalent of an IBAN, issued only by the Eurosystem.
Definition
DEAN
Also written as: Digital Euro Account Number
If you already understand what an IBAN does, you already understand what a DEAN does. It is the identifier that says which digital euro account a payment refers to.
The structure
A DEAN is exactly 18 alphanumeric characters, and every position is accounted for:
| Positions | Length | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | 2 | The literal prefix EU |
| 3–4 | 2 | Check digits (ISO/IEC 7064 MOD 97-10) |
| 5 | 1 | Indicator digit — 0 individual, 1 business |
| 6–18 | 13 | Serial number |
The check digits use ISO/IEC 7064 MOD 97-10 — the same family of checksum used by the IBAN. That is a deliberate choice: it means a typo in a DEAN can be caught client-side, before a payment is ever submitted, using an algorithm most payment engineers have already implemented once.
Positions 5–18 — the indicator digit plus the serial — are the BEAN.
Who creates a DEAN
This is the part that surprises people coming from commercial banking: a PSP cannot mint a DEAN. DEANs are generated only by the Eurosystem, through the DESP. A distributing PSP requests an account and receives the identifier back; it does not allocate identifiers from a range of its own.
The practical consequence is that a DEAN is not a routing instruction. Unlike an IBAN, it does not encode which institution holds the account, because in the digital euro model the Eurosystem — not the PSP — is the settlement layer.
The indicator digit
Position 5 carries real business meaning rather than being padding. 0 marks an account belonging to
an individual; 1 marks a business account. That single character separates two very different rule
sets: an individual may hold a balance up to the holding limit and may attach an alias, while a
business has a holding limit of zero, must always have a linked account, and gets no aliases at all.
Validate before you submit
Because the check digits are IBAN-family, you can verify a DEAN's integrity offline. Try it in the DEAN validator.
Sources
Related reading
Alias
An alias is a pseudonymous identifier — such as a phone number — standing in for a digital euro account, so you can be paid without revealing your DEAN.
BEAN
BEAN is the Basic Euro Account Number — positions 5 to 18 of a DEAN, the indicator digit plus the 13-digit serial.
Acquiring PSP
An acquiring PSP serves business digital euro users — managing merchant accounts and the acceptance solutions through which businesses take payments.
Combined transaction
A combined transaction bundles a digital euro payment with a funding step (reverse waterfall) or a defunding step (waterfall) in one operation.