Swift and the European Payments Council (EPC) are phasing out fully unstructured addresses in ISO 20022 payment messages. Under the new rules, every international and SEPA payment must include at least the town and country of the sending and receiving parties in dedicated structured fields rather than free-text blocks. The original implementation deadline was November 2026, but both Swift and the EPC have since postponed it, with revised dates expected before year-end. The direction of travel is not in doubt: as of July 2026, Swift reported that nearly 60 per cent of payment messages still carried unstructured addresses, signalling a significant compliance backlog across the corporate sector.

The practical pressure, however, is arriving ahead of any revised global deadline. Some banks and jurisdictions are retaining earlier enforcement dates and are already rejecting or queuing payments that do not meet structured address requirements. Separately, euro-area banks have been verifying payee name against account number before authorising transfers since October 2025, under the Verification of Payee framework. Both measures put the compliance burden squarely on the corporate treasury and finance function: address data originates in supplier and customer master records held in the ERP, not in the bank’s systems.

Addovation’s proposition is built around a three-layer model. IFS Cloud or NetSuite remains the core business platform. Cobase sits between the ERP and the bank, normalising outgoing payment files and incoming bank statements into whatever format each bank requires. Cobase claims connectivity to more than 300 banks across more than 90 countries, which is the key selling point for multinational treasuries managing multiple banking relationships with differing local file standards and timelines.

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