Nordic ERP Firm Addovation Partners with Cobase on ISO 20022 Compliance

Swift and the European Payments Council are eliminating fully unstructured addresses from ISO 20022 payment messages. The new rules require every international and SEPA payment to carry the town and country of both sender and recipient in dedicated structured fields, not free-text blocks.

The original November 2026 deadline has been postponed, with revised dates expected later this year. Still, nearly 60 per cent of payment messages in July 2026 contained unstructured addresses, pointing to a major compliance gap in the corporate sector.

Some banks and jurisdictions are enforcing earlier cut-off dates and already rejecting or queuing non-compliant payments. Euro-area banks have been verifying payee name against account number since October 2025 under the Verification of Payee framework. Both measures place the onus on corporate treasury and finance teams, because address data lives in ERP supplier and customer master records, not at the bank.

Addovation's offering relies on a three-tier architecture. IFS Cloud or NetSuite remains the core business system. Cobase provides the middleware layer, normalising outgoing payment files and incoming bank statements to match each bank's format requirements.

Cobase connects to more than 300 banks across more than 90 countries, which is the principal draw for multinational treasuries juggling multiple banking relationships and differing local file standards. Addovation handles the integration and ongoing support through a service called Addovation Engage.

Banks expect more from the payment data your ERP sends them, and the rules keep changing. We don't think one platform should try to do everything. The ERP system stays at the core, Cobase handles the connection to your banks, and we make sure it all works together, from implementation through daily operation.

Fredrik Wingren, chief revenue officer at Addovation, made the case for separating connectivity from the core ERP rather than attempting an all-in-one build.

The ERP-to-bank connectivity space is crowded. Treasury management system vendors, bank-direct host-to-host links, and specialist financial messaging middleware providers all target the same corporate buyers.

The ISO 20022 migration has increased demand for overlay services that translate formats without forcing companies to overhaul their ERP. Providers such as TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions) and several bank-affiliated connectivity platforms offer similar capabilities. Addovation and Cobase will need to compete on the breadth of their bank network, the quality of address-data validation tools, and the speed of implementation for mid-market IFS and NetSuite customers.

The postponement of global deadlines cuts both ways. Extended timelines reduce urgency, but banks that kept earlier enforcement dates create an immediate problem that a readiness check can address.

Addovation is leading with a 30-minute structured-address readiness assessment designed to identify gaps in supplier address records and clarify which bank deadlines apply to a customer's payment flows.

Whether that converts to meaningful pipeline depends on how quickly corporate treasury teams recognise that ISO 20022 compliance is as much an ERP data problem as a bank connectivity challenge.