TARGET Services November 2026 releases moved to 28 November 2026

TARGET Services are the payment and settlement services of the Eurosystem, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the national central banks of the euro area. They include T2 (TARGET RTGS and central liquidity management), which settles large euro payments one by one in central bank money, and TIPS (TARGET Instant Payment Settlement) for instant payments (ECB (external site)).

The services change through scheduled software releases. On 4 September 2026 the Eurosystem confirmed the November 2026 releases and moved their deployment from 14 to 28 November 2026 (ECB (external site)).

The releases were planned to end the use of unstructured postal addresses, written as free lines of text, in line with Swift. After Swift postponed its own change, the Eurosystem reassessed the timeline in August 2026 (ECB reassessment notice (external site)).

The decision keeps the releases and adds a temporary measure in T2. It allows fully unstructured postal addresses in T2 RTGS messages to continue for a limited period (ECB (external site)).

As an illustrative example only: a payment message that gives the creditor address as one free line, "1 Main Street, Milan", is still accepted in T2 after 28 November 2026 while the measure lasts. Without the measure it would need at least a town and a country in separate fields (change request T2-0188-SYS (external site)).

T2 participants are expected to keep implementing structured or hybrid addresses and to be ready to receive unstructured ones during the measure (ECB (external site)).

The releases concern banks that hold accounts in T2 and market infrastructures that settle through TARGET Services (ECB (external site)).

• Payments Operations Analyst: handles T2 payments with both address formats during the temporary measure.
• Payments Messaging Specialist (SWIFT): adapts message templates and validation to the release and the measure.
• Treasury Operations Analyst: plans euro settlement around the new release date of Saturday 28 November 2026.
• Master Data Specialist: converts stored client and counterparty addresses to structured fields.
• Data Governance Analyst: sets the rules for converting address data to structured or hybrid form.

• 28 August 2026: the Eurosystem announced the reassessment of the timeline (ECB reassessment notice (external site)).
• 4 September 2026: releases confirmed and deployment moved to 28 November 2026 (confirmed).
• End of the T2 temporary measure: not yet published (change request T2-0188-SYS (external site)).

For TIPS, the release information gives deployment in production from 23 to 28 November 2026 (Bundesbank TIPS release information (external site)).

TARGET Services and Swift had aligned the end of unstructured addresses with Swift's Standards Release 2026. The national central banks relayed the reassessment to their communities (Banca d'Italia (external site)).

The T2 change request sets out the temporary measure for RTGS messages (change request T2-0188-SYS (external site)).