The address rules and the date they apply are separate questions. This article explains the rules for a financial institution’s address and the cases where a BIC can identify the agent. The earlier calendar has been updated after the Swift and EPC announcements.
Updated timetable
Checked on 10 September 2026. The EPC decision of 9 September maintains unstructured addresses beyond 15 November 2026 under all five payment schemes; the new end date is to be set in October. Swift’s announcement of 27 August defers the payments changes without a replacement address date, with an update by December at the latest. SIX still publishes its separate Swiss timetable.
The earlier 16 November 2026 Fedwire date is also superseded in the source record by November 2027. For each rail and the date its source was reviewed, use the detailed calendar. The old 22 November 2026 date did appear in EPC guidance before its replacement; it must not be confused with the Swiss changes of November 2025.
What the rules actually require
For the address of a financial institution in a payment message, the structured-address rules require far less than a full postal record: town and country, and only when no BIC identifies the agent. That last clause matters more than anything else in the rulebook, because the Swiss implementation guidelines say, in as many words, that it remains possible to replace the address with another element like the BIC.
Read that again from a plumbing perspective: the cheapest way to comply with the address deadline for agent blocks is to not send an address at all — send the BIC. Resolving a bank code to its BIC is what an IBAN and BIC data product does all day. The deadline does not create a new obligation so much as it raises the price of not knowing the BIC.
The genuinely hard part of the migration — structuring the postal addresses of your customers and counterparties — is address-verification territory (postal reference data, per-country formats). We do not pretend to do it, and no bank-data API should.
What we shipped
Two additive pieces, live today.
1. A postal_address block on BIC answers. Wherever our registers can populate at least town and country — which covers 99.3% of the BICs we serve — GET /v1/bic/{code} and POST /v1/iban/validate now carry the address in ISO 20022 vocabulary, with provenance per block. A Swiss institution comes back fully structured from the SIX register:
"postal_address": {
"strt_nm": "Mingerstrasse",
"bldg_nb": "20",
"pst_cd": "3030",
"twn_nm": "Bern",
"ctry": "CH",
"format": "structured",
"source": "SIX BankMaster (Swiss IID register)",
"as_of": "2026-08-03"
}A UK institution enriched from GLEIF comes back hybrid — structured where the legal-entity record is structured, address lines where it is not:
"postal_address": {
"pst_cd": "E14 5HP",
"twn_nm": "LONDON",
"ctry": "GB",
"adr_line": ["1 CHURCHILL PLACE"],
"format": "hybrid",
"source": "GLEIF",
"as_of": "2026-04-13"
}When a register only holds a concatenated street string, we serve it as adr_line and never guess it into strt_nm + bldg_nb. A wrong split looks more compliant than an honest line and validates worse.
2. A free conformity checker: POST /v1/address/check. You send an address you have already structured, name a scheme — sps, hvps_plus or fedwire — and get one finding per rule, each citing the document and date it comes from. It is pure rule evaluation, reads no database, and that is why it is free. Here is a real production answer, trimmed to one finding:
{
"scheme": "sps",
"conforms": false,
"findings": [
{
"rule": "adr_line_no_repeat",
"verdict": "fail",
"detail": "AdrLine \"8001 Zurich\" repeats PstCd and TwnNm.",
"source": "SIX, Swiss Implementation Guidelines for the ISO 20022 Payment Standard — Credit Transfer (pain.001), SPS 2026 v2.3, valid from 14 November 2026 (published 20.02.2026), ch. 3.11 table 9."
}
]
}One scheme is deliberately missing: ask for cbpr+ and you get a refusal with the reason, not a guess. The CBPR+ usage guidelines live behind SWIFT's paywalled MyStandards platform; a "CBPR+ compliant" badge computed from rules we cannot cite would be theatre. The three schemes we do check are published, dated, and quoted on every finding.
What we will not tell you
We will not tell you that November 2026 is an emergency you can buy your way out of with a badge. For agent addresses, the honest checklist is short: know your counterparty's BIC, send it, and where you must send an address anyway, make sure town and country are structured. The first two items are a lookup we already sold you. The third is now a free endpoint.
The docs page — ISO 20022 structured addresses — carries the full rule tables, the per-scheme differences, and the primary sources with their dates.