Posti Address Validation

Do you know Finland’s official postal service, Posti, has a rich history of over 400 years? Governor-General Per Brahe started postal services in Finland, a part of the Swedish kingdom. In Q4 2023, Posti delivered around 99 million addressed letters nationwide and overseas. 

But how do you ensure your mailpiece and parcel reach the intended recipient? Using Posti address validation should be the first step in your daily workflow. It can help you cross-verify the Finnish addresses against the official records and make them consistent. However, business users would need comprehensive tools to run validation tasks in bulk to save time and effort. It helps them integrate the most updated records into their database, making operations smoother and more accurate. This blog is meant to help you understand Posti address validation, how it works, better alternatives, Finnish address format, and more.

Key Takeaways

• PostNL address validation tool helps businesses verify their customers’ delivery addresses to ensure they can mail to the correct recipients. The post office checks whether the address exists in its data records and makes necessary modifications. 
• You can use Adrescheck Basis Nationaal to check Dutch mailing addresses and Adrescheck International to check Benelux and other global addresses. These PostNL services let you reformat and cleanse the records in real-time. 
• PostNL is designed to help individuals and businesses check addresses to complete deliveries. Thus, it has several limitations, such as restrictions on checking remote addresses and not showing unserviceable areas. 
• PostGrid’s address verification API is a better alternative because it offers international address autocomplete, geocoding, bulk verification, etc., at low prices.

1. Abbreviations: You might need to use specific abbreviations to write Finnish addresses. Finland uses ‘Talo’ for building, ‘Katu’ for street, ‘Nr.’ for number (house or building number), and ‘Oy’ for Osakeyhtiö (limited liability company).
2. Alignment: All Finnish addresses are left-aligned for ease of reading and postal processing.
3. Postal Code Usage: Finland relies on a five-digit postal code system, including an appropriate and accurate for successful mail delivery.
4. Language: Finnish and Swedish are the two official languages of Finland. They are typically used to address domestic mail. However, English is acceptable for international mail and packages.
5. Supplemental Information: Include additional information about the addressee on the second line to support the delivery process. For example, ℅ (care-of) name, building floor, or department name.

A typical Finnish address format consists of two lines (street name with building number and postal code with locality name). Begin the address by writing the addressee’s full name and appropriate titles for the region. Then, you must mention the street name, building number, and unit or sub-building. Only use space without any punctuation between them. 

Moving to the following line, you should write the appropriate five-digit postal code and town or city name. Write ‘FIN’ in capital letters for international mail as a short form of Finland. 

Here is what the format should look like:

Your sample address would look like this:

The Address is Absent From the Posti Database 

Despite maintaining the nation’s address database, it is possible to miss some delivery points that don’t receive mail regularly. For example, the postal service might not cover some remote locations, cottages, and seasonal properties. Businesses often have difficulty delivering mail or packages to such places in Finland. 

Incorrect Formatting or Typos 

Posti’s address validation tool does provide standardization capabilities to fix minor errors or inconsistencies. However, it won’t help you much if you make too many misspellings or abbreviation errors. Incorrect placement of building or apartment numbers may also lead to delays or delivery failure. 

The Recipient Recently Moved

Your address might be outdated, and the addressee recently moved to a new location. Posti requires individuals to use their online bank user ID or Posti credentials to initiate the notification of a change of address. The Finish law might make it mandatory to make the notification within one week of the move. However, the change might take some time, leading to failed or delayed deliveries. 

Incorrect Postal Code 

Finland assigns its postal codes by region and even occasionally changes them. Fetching the precise postal code for a specific address can make it difficult. Mistakes might make your mail items go to entirely different locations.

Unreliable Tracking System 

Businesses need accurate tracking tools to locate their mail and packages. Posti’s tracking system isn’t entirely reliable. You might experience several days of delay in seeing updates for international mail items. It is often a massive roadblock for companies operating globally with a supply chain of shipments. 

Limited for Business Usage 

All the Posti’s address validation tools are only available for business purposes. Individuals cannot use their tools to validate or standardize their addresses. Alternatively, they can use their free-to-download postal code data without street names or mapping data. 

Requires Proper Formatting 

Even though Posti provides standardization capabilities, you must pay close attention to formatting. Typo errors or invalid formatting often lead to validation problems. The system can only fix errors to some extent. Linguistic barriers are often responsible for standardization issues. 

Lack of Real-Time Validation 

Posti maintains a change-of-address database but only updates it periodically. Businesses don’t gain access to real-time address data. New changes take some time to reflect on the official database, and newly registered addresses take the most time to register under Posti. 

No Access to Premise Level Address Data 

Posti might provide individual and address identifiers but doesn’t provide secondary address data. Premise-level data gives you indicators, such as “floor,” “unit,” “building,” “suite,” etc. Locating recipients in addresses containing multiple delivery points becomes harder, leading to inefficiency, delays, or mail returns.

Finland’s Posti provides impressive address validation capabilities with their APIs for businesses. You can go to their website and register to run validation checks to see the availability and deliverability of addresses. However, the absence of geocoding data and real-time validation makes ensuring preciseness and updated information challenging. 

Posti’s address validation tools are primarily suitable for delivering mail items via their postal services. You are out of luck if you want to do anything unique, like location intelligence, demographic analysis, risk assessment, or customer onboarding, with the help of their solutions. Businesses seek advanced solutions with broader coverage, higher data sources, geocoding, and integrations. 

PostGrid’s Address Verification API is the perfect scalable, reliable, and advanced solution for businesses to autocomplete, validate, verify, standardize, and cleanse addresses. It seamlessly integrates with your existing favorite tools to save time, costs, and effort while validating high-volume data. 

The accuracy is even higher than Posti’s because it relies on multiple authoritative sources. You get complete coverage of even non-postal addresses and rural locations, supporting your deliveries, mapping intelligence, and marketing campaign efforts. We also provide flexible pricing models to fit the needs of every business. Whether you are an emerging startup or a global conglomerate, we can scale our solution for everyone.

PostGrid is your go-to solution for every address validation, standardization, and cleansing task for making addresses accurate, deliverable, and complete. You don’t need to wait for Posti to validate your address data; we do it in real-time within a few clicks. Our API relies on multiple authoritative databases to fetch and validate your addresses accurately. We understand that you cannot hand over critical address data to anyone. Meta (the parent company of Facebook) had to pay a fine of €1.2 billion for transferring personal data to the US and breaking the GDPR guidelines. Our address validation API fully complies with the GDPR and SOC-2 regulatory requirements, making it a secure and reliable business solution. Some other helpful features of our solution include; 

Extended Autocomplete Results

Most address mistakes occur at the entry point. An autocomplete feature automatically suggests relevant addresses when users start typing in an address field, eliminating poor data from entering the database. Our API can produce up to 100 results for each input for ultimate convenience and speed. It is a perfect feature for ecommerce businesses where every step matters to reduce friction in the checkout experience. 

Geocoding Data 

Posti’s lack of geocoding data doesn’t provide precise location information. You still need to rely on assumptions to locate addresses on a map. PostGrid has geocoding and reverse geocoding capabilities, helping you fetch each delivery location’s geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude). You can also use the coordinate data to find postal addresses. This information allows businesses to enrich addresses, marketing campaigns, or location intelligence. 

International Address Validation Coverage 

PostGrid helps you validate and standardize addresses from 245+ countries and territories, which is ideal for businesses with global operations. Instead of validating addresses of a single country with a dedicated tool, you get broader coverage. 

Transliteration 

PostGrid supports automatic transliteration to provide bilingual address support in Finland. It can detect multiple languages to convert characters into a Roman script or vice versa. This feature is handy, considering Finnish and Swedish are Finland’s official languages. Some street names or cities might be written in native script. 

Native Integrations for Ease of Use 

Businesses using CRMs, ERPs, accounting software, and ecommerce platforms don’t need to worry while using PostGrid. We offer native integrations for your favorite tools and systems so you can quickly validate, standardize, and cleanse address data as soon as you receive them. It improves your operational efficiency and drastically reduces costs.  

Contact us today to get started with address validation, standardization, geocoding, and more for Finnish addresses!