Swift has postponed the retirement of unstructured postal addresses in cross-border CBPR+ payment messages, originally set for mid-November 2026, after several banking communities formally asked for more time. The Swift community had decided in 2023 to make structured addresses mandatory. Swift announced the delay in late August 2026.
In ISO 20022, a structured address splits a postal address across separate fields of the payment message. An unstructured address fits into two lines of free text.
The delay goes beyond addresses. Swift has deferred every payment change in Standards Release 2026, the annual update to its message catalog. Standards Release 2025 stays in force until it is replaced, and the work banks had scheduled for a November 2026 go-live no longer has a cutover date.
Payment changes wait, securities changes go ahead
| Item | Status announced |
|---|---|
| Retirement of unstructured addresses in CBPR+ | deferred, new timeline to be set |
| Category 1 MT messages | deferred |
| SCORE+ and Swift Go | deferred |
| Non-payment changes, including the move to T+1 in some markets | decoupled, live in the first quarter of 2027 |
| Standards Release 2025 | remains in force until replaced |
Two milestones follow. Swift is to confirm the exact date of the partial release in the first quarter of 2027 by mid-September 2026. It will consult banks, central banks, payment market infrastructures, market practice groups, and corporates on the structured address timeline, and has promised an update by December 2026 at the latest.
Nearly half of banks are behind schedule
Swift pointed to uneven progress, with institutions in every region still unable to meet the requirement. A RedCompass Labs survey of 308 payments professionals in Europe and North America shows how far behind many are. Banks surveyed said they had committed about $20 million to the 2026 requirements and assigned 13 additional staff to the project on average.
Fedwire pushes its release back a year
Federal Reserve Financial Services has moved the Fedwire Funds Service release planned for November 2026 to November 2027. That release was to align Fedwire with Swift and CHIPS and require the hybrid format for postal addresses. The final scope of the rescheduled release will be announced in fall 2026.
The SEPA deadline has not moved
The SEPA timeline is set by the European Payments Council, not Swift. The 2025 rulebooks for the SCT, SCT Inst, and SDD schemes end acceptance of the unstructured format on November 15, 2026, a date chosen to coincide with the cutover weekend of Swift’s November 2026 release. From then on, town and country become mandatory in their dedicated fields. As of August 28, 2026, no change to that date had been announced.
Swift’s decision leaves European payment service providers with two separate timelines. The domestic deadline of November 15, 2026, stands, while the cross-border deadline no longer has a date. Cleaning up customer address data pays off either way, because noncompliant data is rejected as soon as the rules take effect, with no grace period.
The consequences of a reject are mechanical. The network refuses a noncompliant message, which feeds exception queues and slows processing. There will be no transition period, according to Pratiksha Pathak, partner and head of payments at RedCompass Labs: “Once enforcement begins, systems will not accommodate incomplete data.”