Structured addresses for cross-border payments
From November 2026, a payment message carrying a fully unstructured address is rejected. Acuris turns free-text payee addresses into ISO 20022 components — and, unlike the tools that merely reformat them, tells you when the address is not real.
What the mandate actually requires
There is a great deal of loose copy circulating on this, so here is the position as the rulebooks state it. What is withdrawn is the fully unstructured address — data carried only in free-text address lines. Two shapes remain valid, and one of them has no end date at all.
| Shape | Status from November 2026 |
|---|---|
| Fully unstructured Free-text address lines only | Rejected by the network. |
| Hybrid Country + Town tagged, remainder in up to two 70-character lines | Valid. Permanently — the PMPG guidance sets no end date for it. |
| Fully structured Component tags only, no free-text lines | Valid, and the preferred end state. |
Only Country and Town are mandatory. Street, building number and postcode are recommended on every rail, and required on none of them. And the network check is a schema check: it tests that the tags are present and well formed. It does not test whether the address exists.
An address that is complete nonsense will settle, provided it is nonsense in the correct tags.
Which is why reformatting is not the job
Getting a message past the November gate is a solved problem, and an inexpensive one. A parser reads free text, guesses a town and a country, and writes them into the right tags. Swift publish an open-source model that does precisely this, and it is free.
What a parser cannot do is tell you it guessed wrong. It has no reference data behind it — it predicts a town from a gazetteer, so it has no concept of a false one. Feed it a fabricated address and it will return a structurally perfect, semantically wrong payload, and that payload will settle.
Town and Country are screened fields. A wrong one does not stop the payment; it corrupts sanctions matching, it sits inside the accuracy expectation behind FATF Recommendation 16 and EU Regulation 2023/1113, and from 17 November it becomes a repair queue.
Structure
Free text in; Ctry, TwnNm, StrtNm, BldgNb, PstCd, CtrySubDvsn out. Both the fully structured and the CBPR+ hybrid shape are returned from a single call, so your caller emits whichever their rail accepts.
Validate
Every component is resolved against national postal and cadastral reference data across 249 countries — not inferred from a gazetteer. You get a confidence grade, and an explicit account of what we changed and why.
Refute
The part nobody else ships. We tell you when the town does not exist in that country, and when the town and the postcode contradict each other. Mule accounts and shell companies have addresses that do not resolve.
Refutation, in one call
A Berlin street and a Berlin postcode, submitted as a French address. A reformatter returns a valid-looking French payload. We return the truth.
We separate what we refute from what we merely could not confirm. A street we cannot find is a gap in our coverage, not an accusation against your payee — and it is never reported as one.
Built for the payment message, not the parcel
| ISO 20022 element | What we return |
|---|---|
Ctry | Alpha-2, uppercase, as the standard requires. |
TwnNm | Resolved against reference data, and asserted to exist in that country. |
StrtNm / BldgNb | Split and resolved; point-coordinate verified where our data supports it. |
PstCd | Checked for coherence with the town. Where the two contradict each other, the response says so explicitly rather than reconciling them for you. |
Flr / Room / PstBx | Carried as their own elements. A PO box is a valid payment address, and we treat it as one. |
AdrLine | Hybrid shape only, capped at two lines of 70 characters, and never repeating data already in a structured tag. |
One address per call, stateless REST, no session to hold. A CBPR+ message carries several addresses — the debtor, the creditor, and every agent and party on the record — so the integration is simply one call per party address.
Median response on the corridors that carry cross-border volume is in the tens of milliseconds. A batch path is available for one-off remediation of stored beneficiary records, which is a larger problem than data in flight and a separate conversation.
Send us your worst addresses
Real ones — messy, truncated, mis-keyed, the free-text strings actually sitting in your beneficiary records. We will return the structured output, an honest flag with a reason wherever we fail, a per-record confidence, and a per-country hit-rate grid including the countries where we are weak.
We will not promise you a hit rate before we have seen your data, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does.
Acuris is an address data and verification engine. We are not a payment service provider, and nothing here is compliance advice — the dates and rules above are drawn from the Swift, PMPG, EPC and Bank of England publications and are worth confirming against your own rail.