Payments modernisation has often been treated as a technical compliance exercise; a project for banks, ERP providers and back-office technology teams to grapple with while the business gets on with more pressing priorities. That luxury is about to disappear.
From 14 November 2026, unstructured addresses will no longer be accepted in relevant cross-border and CHAPS payments. Banks must make this change too, and can help firms adapt in time to avoid payments being delayed, queried or rejected.
Firms should assume the deadline will not move, planning for the worst while hoping for the best. This is not administrative housekeeping; it is a business continuity issue.
For many firms, address data remains trapped in free-text fields across ERP systems, treasury platforms, customer databases and supplier records. Once the new rules take effect, payment messages containing non-compliant address information are likely to fail validation before they reach their destination. What looks like a data-quality issue could quickly become a payment-execution problem.
When payments fail, costs rise. Treasury teams face manual investigations. Operations teams process repairs and resubmissions. Suppliers chase missing funds. Customer service teams manage complaints. Liquidity buffers may need to increase to accommodate settlement uncertainty. The cost of fixing data now is almost certainly lower than the cost of repairing payments later.
The challenge is not simply system readiness. Firms need to review and potentially remediate thousands, sometimes millions, of supplier, customer and counterparty records. Address components that have historically been stored in a single field may now need to be captured, validated and maintained as distinct data elements. Data remediation will prove harder than technology remediation.
As the deadline approaches, banks, treasury software vendors and payment service providers could face intense demand for support, testing and remediation assistance. Organisations planning a last-minute response may discover that specialist resources are scarce and implementation queues are long. The firms that start earliest will have the greatest room to manoeuvre. Firms mustn't delay their preparations and should engage partners now.
There is an upside. Properly structured address data can reduce false positives in anti-money laundering and sanctions screening, cut delays and costs associated with manual payment repairs, improve reconciliation, and provide cleaner information for analytics and liquidity forecasting.
And the same discipline required to meet the deadline can unlock the wider promise of ISO 20022: payments that carry enough context to be processed, reconciled and understood automatically. From November 2026, richer data will cease to be an aspiration and become a prerequisite. For treasurers, the message is simple: find bad address data before the payments system does.
Simon Eacott, head of payments, and Ritu Sehgal, head of commercial & institutional initiatives, at Natwest Group
