So what does a BIC look like?

There are two different formats: full BICs are 11 characters long, but they can be 8 characters ?C in which case they are known as a Business Party Identifier. A typical BIC 11 which includes a branch code looks like this:

TBNFFR43PAR

4 character bank code

2 character ISO country code

2 character location code

3 character branch code(optional)