The fact that they only take SEPA for payments is a big part of the problem. Screams "if you aren't European we don't want you here".
Afaik you can also do wire transfers in other countries but there are some fees involved, so isn't IBAN available to anyone with any bank account if they're okay seeing fees which the payment platform would otherwise hide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
Only European bank accounts can do SEPA transfers.
Europe is many nations, not one.
SEPA is the Eurozone area that treats all transfers as domestic - usually free or near-free, and fast (max 1 day normally, max 10 seconds for instant transfer).
IBAN is just a numbering scheme to uniquely identify bank accounts worldwide. It has nothing to do with transfers. The closest thing would be SWIFT, though that's just an information protocol and says nothing about fees or times.
IBAN is also used by some countries outside of EU. It's basically just a way to assign an alphanumeric code to an account so that it also includes a country code, bank code, and checksum.
Also when getting money from Japan (mtgox), I had to put in the bank's branch address and some funny details one doesn't usually need, but it's possible to receive it on my IBAN account
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According to SWIFT, the account is defined by a combination of bank identifier and account identifier. That is, account identifiers are supposed to be unique only within the bank. (Not sure about this part.)
There are many ways to identify an account, IBAN is one of them. Other methods require you to specify a "schema" (one of predefined codes 1-4 characters long), an "issuer" (string up to 35 chars), and "id" (string up to 34 chars).
I suppose banks know the values that make sense for their customers, and otherwise just forward the information to other banks.
IBAN is an alphanumeric string, where the first two characters are country code, and the meaning of the rest is country-specific. BIC is encoded in IBAN, so the information provided is redundant (in the payment you specify both the bank and the account, but the account also specifies the bank).
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SEPA is a subset of SWIFT, with extra rules imposed. The currency is EUR, and the only allowed account identifier is IBAN.
That means, SEPA requires IBAN, but you can also use IBAN outside of SEPA as one of many possible ways of identifying the account. For example, if I pay from EU to USA, I am using my IBAN account in a non-SEPA payment.
(I can certainly see where you're coming from, I just wanted to provide some additional insight.)
They are just using sloppy language. SEPA is just a payment system for cheaper and faster payments. It uses still uses regular bank accounts to send from and to, it can be regarded as backwards compatible with normal bank transfers.