Swift delays ISO 20022 structured address deadline

Swift has agreed to extend the November deadline for moving from unstructured to structured postal addresses in ISO 20022 payment messages. The organisation will pause the planned payment changes, carry out a wide consultation with industry participants and publish an update by December.

The address change was part of Swift’s Standards Release 2026, a decision taken in 2023 to standardise how postal addresses are carried in ISO 20022 messages. Swift noted progress has been uneven and that large parts of the industry across all regions remain unable to meet the requirement. Several payments communities and banks formally requested more time to comply.

Swift will defer all payment-related changes tied to the address requirement and begin a consultation process. Participants will include banks, central banks, payment market infrastructures, market practice groups and corporate users. The consultation will aim to define a revised timetable and an implementation approach that reflects differing levels of readiness across regions and domestic systems.

Financial institutions that have already upgraded systems to handle structured addresses can pass those addresses through the Swift network now and receive cleaner, machine-readable address data. Swift urged domestic payment market infrastructures and financial institutions to continue adopting structured addresses, describing domestic uptake as a critical enabler of cross-border progress.

Industry groups and some national payment systems had raised concerns about meeting the November deadline, citing uneven readiness, integration work with legacy systems and the need to coordinate changes with domestic payment rails. Swift’s pause is intended to reduce the risk of operational disruption if some parts of the network moved while others could not.

The consultation will seek input on timing, transitional measures and any interim standards or mapping rules needed to ensure interoperability between systems that have switched to structured addresses and those that remain on unstructured formats. Swift will report the outcome of the consultations and the new timing by December.