Structured address (ISO 20022)
The requirement that party addresses in a payment be split into separate fields for street, postcode, town and country instead of free text.
MT messages gave an address four lines of 35 characters, and what went in them was a private arrangement between the sender and their keyboard. ISO 20022 has dedicated elements such as StrtNm, PstCd, TwnNm and Ctry. The point is sanctions screening and the FATF rule that payments must carry originator and beneficiary information: a machine that knows which bit is the town and which is the country raises fewer false alarms on the wrong person.
For cross-border payments under CBPR+ and the major RTGS systems, fully unstructured addresses stop being accepted in November 2026. The compromise is the hybrid address, where town and country must sit in their own fields but the rest may go on up to two free-text lines. That a compromise was needed says a lot about how many customer databases never knew where the street ended and the town began.