ISO 20022 in bytes for payments: Call-to-action for November 2026
As momentum builds across the community, preparations are under way for a critical milestone in November 2026. This milestone is pivotal to enabling rich, structured data and unlocking the full benefits of the ISO 20022 migration. After 14 November 2026, unstructured addresses will be removed. Only fully structured or hybrid postal addresses will be accepted.
ISO 20022 in bytes for payments: Call-to-action for November 2026
April’s data shows that 61.2% of payments included unstructured Debtor postal addresses, while 62.9% included unstructured Creditor information. This highlights that the community still has a long way to go to reach the target of 0% unstructured addresses.
It’s important to note that there is no Swift contingency measure to process non-compliant messages. Payments that do not include structured or hybrid postal address data may be rejected or delayed as they move through the payment chain. Financial institutions should therefore develop processes to manage rejections and repairs where structured data is missing or incorrectly provided by customers. This will help minimise operational disruption and reduce customer impact.
We’ve published three Quick Guides for Financial Institutions, Corporates and Payment Market Infrastructures on our dedicated swift.com page. These guides are designed to raise awareness of the removal of unstructured addresses in November 2026. We encourage you to share these materials with your customers and communities to help explain the impact of the changes.
PMPG guidance
The PMPG has released its PMPG monthly insights – April 2026. These insights share key information and advice on the change, alongside a useful PMPG template letter to corporates. The letter helps financial institutions explain the impact of the change to their customers. In March there was also an update to the Industry guidance on the introduction of hybrid postal address to support the community with the cutover period.
Call to Action for Financial Institutions
Engage customers and partners to communicate requirements
- Educate corporate customers on the requirements and ensure creditor town and country data is sourced at a minimum.
- Liaise with technology partners to align on required system updates.
Ensure channel applications can structure address information
- Undertake an end-to-end impact assessment and align across internal operational and technology teams
- Allocate adequate time and resources to adapt and enhance systems to meet the requirements
- Equip customers with payment specifications and interfaces that mandate the inclusion of address data. Provide testing capabilities in advance.
- Verify that customer data conforms to the specified target formats before initiating payments
Call to Action for Corporate Customers
From November 2026, corporates can continue sending MT101 initiation messages to financial institutions. There is currently no migration deadline for corporates to move to SCORE+. However, with the removal of unstructured postal address fields, corporates that continue to use MT101 must upgrade to field 59, option F to meet the structured address requirements.
Corporates must source creditor address information through their own channels, store it in their ERP or treasury application, and provide it to the bank at payment initiation. At a minimum, this must include the town name and country.
This requirement applies regardless of the channel used, whether MT101 SCORE, pain.001 SCORE+, or banks’ proprietary channels. Banks will require this information to execute the payment. For the beneficiary bank, if a BIC is used as the identifier, no bank postal address is required.
To fully benefit from this transition, we strongly recommend migrating to the ISO 20022 messaging standard, specifically using the pain.001 message format for payment initiation. This will:
- Improve straight‑through processing (STP)
- Reduce manual interventions and errors
- Enhance data quality and integrity throughout the payment lifecycle
- Support compliance with global regulatory and screening requirements
What support is available?
Discuss your plans with your banking correspondents. Most can support you by:
- Providing detailed format specifications
- Offering testing support
- Reviewing legacy mappings and helping design compliant templates
- Offering additional resources, including address validation tools where applicable
Call to Action for Payment Market Infrastructures
From November 2026, fully unstructured postal addresses will no longer be allowed in the cross-border space. Payments must use hybrid or fully structured addresses to avoid rejections or delays.
The latest ISO Accelerator Pack (IAP) version aligned with the HVPS+ market practice 2026 is IAP v1.4, published on 4th May. IAP v1.2 will no longer be maintained from November 2026.
This means that:
- No bug fixes or corrections will be provided for IAP v1.2.
- New requests related to IAP v1.2 will be rejected, including:
- Any change requests for IAP v1.2.
- Any provisioning requests from market infrastructures (MIs) requesting onboarding on IAP v1.2.
If an MI remains on IAP v1.2, it should clearly inform participants that transactions with a cross-border leg containing a hybrid address cannot be supported domestically.
If an MI remains on IAP v1.3, it should clearly inform participants not to use unstructured addresses in the domestic leg of a transaction, as they cannot be forwarded in the outgoing cross-border leg.
MIs that are still on FIN should plan immediately for migration to ISO 20022 using IAP v1.4.
MIs planning to go live on IAP v1.4 in November 2026 can already start placing e-orders. Early and correct submission of the relevant forms can significantly accelerate provisioning timelines.
Address structuring with AI
Our open-source, AI-powered address structuring solution is available free of charge to help you meet this ISO 20022 requirement and structure your customer information. You can download the solution from swift.com and GitHub.
See the FAQ for more details: ISO 20022: The Swift AI address structuring model | Swift. You can also contact us at swift.address.structuring@swift.com.
Unlocking insights on address structure
Data Quality Analytics provides actionable insights into the completeness, consistency and structure of your ISO 20022 payment data. It helps you understand where gaps and inconsistencies exist today.
A new Swift Smart video on insights into address structure is now available. It walks you through intuitive dashboards that show how address data is populated across messages and where differences may affect processing and interoperability.
Discover the insights and explore the video to see how you can strengthen your data quality readiness.
Available free of charge for 2026. Order Data Quality Analytics now or contact your account manager to find out more.
3-year Exceptions & Investigations Transformation Plan
The E&I Readiness Guide is available on Knowledge Centre.
From November, all financial institutions must be able to receive a camt.110 investigation request through Case Management. In‑flow translation, where the camt.110 includes an embedded MT 199, will enable non‑Case Management participants to continue investigations through bilateral exchange of MT messages over FIN.
To help prepare the community for this requirement, we’ve created an E&I Readiness Guide. Read the guide to understand the changes, how to prepare, and how best to manage investigations from November 2026.
MT101 interbank ‘relay’ migration to pain.001
As a reminder, November 2026 marks the end of coexistence for MT 101. This means:
- MT 101 (multiple) is end of life and will be NAKed.
- MT 101 (single) will be subject to contingency processing. An automatic bootstrap will apply, with MT101 to pain.001 conversion subject to additional FIN validation. Fees will apply.
The Implementation Guide was developed by Swift in collaboration with the community. It supports institutions with the MT101 interbank ‘relay’ migration to pain.001.
Organisations must determine their approach to ensure a business framework is in place. For most financial institutions, accession to the Rulebook is the default approach. Ensure you accede to the pain.001 Rulebook and declare your BIC(s), readiness dates and the roles they support.
The ISO 20022 Payments Initiation Relay Rulebook Directory lists peers that have already acceded.
Since November 2025, in‑flow translation has supported pain.001 interbank messages to MT 101. The additional validation rules for the chargeable conversion service from November 2026 are available here and cover MT101 single instructions.
Further information is available in the Rulebook for Payment Initiation Relay knowledge base article, as well as details on the RMA bootstrap planned to support the end of coexistence of MT101.
Mandatory to receive admi.024
MT 199 and MT 299 related to other use cases will migrate to the new ISO 20022 correspondence message.
- Since November 2025, usage guidelines for admi.024 have been available for use with bilateral agreements through a manual Relationship Management Application (RMA) process. In‑flow translation was also activated to support admi.024.
- From November 2026, there is an obligation to receive admi.024. This will be supported by an automatic RMA bootstrap to enforce the mandatory‑to‑receive status.
- In this context, the target retirement dates for MT 199 and MT 299 messages are under review.
For more information, see the knowledge base article.
Prepare for SR 2026 in Pilot – Customer Testing Guidelines
On 18 July 2026, FINplus Pilot Future and FIN future mode will be available with the CBPR+ 2026 Usage Guidelines and the SR 2026 validation rules.
The Test Sparring Partner (TSP) includes several test catalogues that allow financial institutions (FIs) to validate their systems against SR 2026. The test cases cover scenarios where TSP sends a pacs message containing hybrid addresses. Premium users can also configure structured addresses.
All catalogues are available under the CBPR+ tab on the main TSP page.
A snapshot includes:
- CBPR+ ISO 20022 with hybrid or structured address (unstructured addresses are NAKed)
- Sender of payment instructions using the MT conversion service
- End of coexistence of interbank MT 101, replaced by pain.001
For Payment Market Infrastructures (PMIs) administrators (central banks) and PMI members, dedicated catalogues are available on request under the ISO Accelerator Pack for PMIs tab. Central banks can test all functionalities of their RTGS systems. Member FIs can send and receive payments that are settled by their domestic PMI.
After testing with TSP, we recommend that FIs agree with counterparties on test windows and test scope for end-to-end testing.
CBPR+ SR2026 changes
This year’s Standards Release includes around 70 community driven change requests, with full details available in the release note. Some of these updates are particularly important to prepare for, to avoid any impact to your operations or your customers:
- CR 3102 formalises the existing textual rule requiring the Business Message Identifier to match the Message Identification in the Group Header. This impacts all CBPR+ Usage Guidelines except camt.029, camt.055 and camt.056.
- CR 3014 formalises the existing textual rule requiring the Payment Information Identification to match the Message Identification in the Group Header. This impacts pain.001, pain.002 and pain.008
- CR 3013 mandates the elements Instructed Amount and Returned Instructed Amount. The impacted messages are pacs.003, pacs.004, pacs.008, pacs.008 STP and pacs.009 COV.
- CR 3020 mandates the correct use of the GPI Service Level Code in pacs.008, pacs.008 STP, pacs.009 ADV, pacs.009 COV and pacs.009. Where an incorrect code is used, a rejection will occur.
- CR 3035 merges the pacs.010 and pacs.010 Margin Collection Usage Guidelines. The pacs.010 Margin Collection Usage Guideline will no longer exist.
- CR 3089 upgrades the CBPR+ camt.105 and camt.105 multiple Usage Guidelines to version 3 of the ISO 20022 base message.
- CR 3098 upgrades the CBPR+ camt.106 and camt.106 multiple Usage Guidelines to version 3 of the ISO 20022 base message.
- CR 3018 mandates the element Return Identification in pacs.004.
- CR 3021 mandates the element Electronic Sequence Number in camt.052 and camt.053.
For more information on these CRs and full details of the changes included in Standards Release 2026, see the CBPR+ SR2026 Usage Guidelines.