The first six digits, including the major industry identifier, compose the issuer identifier number (IIN) which identifies the issuing organization. The IINS was previously called the "bank identification number" (BIN) and some places still use that term.
Read more about this topic: ISO/IEC 7812
Famous quotes containing the word number:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)