ISO 20022 Data Quality Report: Structured Addresses, LEIs and Remittance

Migration to ISO 20022 was meant to deliver richer, more structured payment data. This report, based on anonymized validation results from message traffic passing through Gantry's platform, looks at how much of that promise is being realized.

Structured addresses remain the biggest gap

Cross-border payment messaging is moving away from fully unstructured postal addresses, with the industry timetable pointing to November 2026 as the point after which fully unstructured addresses are no longer accepted for cross-border payments on the main network. In our sample, a large share of messages still carried at least one party address in unstructured form. The most common source was not the bank's payment system but upstream customer data held in free-text fields.

Truncation still happens at the edges

Where ISO 20022 messages pass through systems built for older formats, fields are often truncated or dropped. We found that remittance information and ultimate-party details were the fields most frequently lost when messages crossed such boundaries. Each loss reduces the effectiveness of sanctions screening and makes automated reconciliation harder for the beneficiary.

LEIs are underused

The Legal Entity Identifier provides an unambiguous identity for companies in a payment. Usage in our sample remained low outside the largest corporates and financial institutions, although it was rising. We encourage banks to capture LEIs during onboarding so they can be populated automatically.

Recommendations

Fix data at source: structure addresses in customer master data rather than parsing them in flight. Map every internal hop that touches a payment and eliminate or wrap truncating systems. Measure repair rates by originating system, not just by rail. The richer data model only delivers value if the data survives end to end.