MT940
MT940 is a SWIFT FIN message format that banks use to send prior-day end-of-day account statements to corporate customers, giving treasury and AR teams a structured feed of balances and transactions for cash positioning, reconciliation, and cash application across multiple banks and currencies.
MT940 is a SWIFT FIN message that a bank sends to a corporate customer to report the prior-day end-of-day statement for a specific account. It is part of the MT series, the legacy financial messaging standard governed by SWIFT, which has carried interbank and bank-to-corporate traffic for decades. The MT9xx category covers cash management and customer status messages, and MT940 specifically delivers a structured statement covering opening balance, every booked transaction for the period, and a closing balance.
For multinational treasury and AR teams, MT940 is often the backbone of daily cash visibility. A group with twenty banking partners across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia can receive a consolidated MT940 feed each morning, parse it into a treasury management system or a cash application platform, and have a single global view of cash by the start of the business day. SWIFT is now migrating its messaging estate to ISO 20022, but MT940 remains heavily used in practice and will coexist with the new XML formats for years.
An MT940 file is built from tagged fields. Each tag starts with a colon, a numeric code, and an optional letter qualifier. The core fields are consistent across banks, even if the content inside them varies.
A single MT940 message can carry many :61 and :86 pairs, and a long statement may be split across several messages, linked by :28C sequence numbers. The format is fixed-width and line-oriented, which makes it parseable by software but also fragile when banks bend the conventions.
MT940 is one of three formats most treasury teams encounter for end-of-day statements. BAI2 is the equivalent in the United States, a flat-file format defined by the Bank Administration Institute, with type codes for each transaction and a different structural philosophy. ISO 20022 camt.053 is the modern XML format that carries the same statement concept with richer, more standardized fields, including structured remittance information that does not rely on a free-form narrative.
The practical difference matters for AR teams. MT940 forces remittance details into the :86 narrative, where the layout varies bank by bank. BAI2 uses type codes and text fields with similar challenges. camt.053 supports structured remittance blocks that can carry invoice numbers as discrete elements, which makes downstream cash application much cleaner. Many corporates run a hybrid environment today, with MT940 from older bank connections, BAI2 from US banks, and camt.053 from banks already on ISO 20022.
MT940 supports several day-one finance processes. Treasury teams use it for cash positioning, pulling balances and movements from every bank account into a single morning report. AR and cash application teams use it as the source of incoming wire and ACH-equivalent receipts that need to be matched to open invoices. Bank reconciliation teams use it to tie general ledger cash accounts back to the bank book of record. Multi-bank cash visibility programmes, common in groups with shared service centres, depend on MT940 to normalize information from very different bank partners into one feed.
MT940 looks structured, but real files are full of edge cases. The :86 narrative is the main source of trouble. Some banks pack remittance details with key-value subfields, others use free text, and a few mix the two. Line continuations and character set limits in the legacy format can truncate invoice numbers or split them across lines. Multiple statements in one transmission, partial statements across sequence numbers, and special end-of-month entries can all confuse a naive parser. Currency and balance sign conventions differ subtly between banks, and the same transaction type code can mean slightly different things from one institution to another.
AI-native cash application platforms treat MT940 as a structured spine with a noisy narrative. The :61 and balance fields are parsed strictly, so amounts, dates, and references are reliable. The :86 field is then read with AI-driven narrative extraction that recognizes invoice patterns, customer names, and reference codes in any layout, normalizes them, and matches them to open AR. Agentic workflows handle deduplication when the same transaction shows up in both an MT940 and a near-real-time feed, and they reconcile MT940 closing balances against the treasury system automatically. The result is straight-through cash application for the bulk of receipts, with a clean exception queue for the genuine edge cases.
MT940 is a SWIFT message that a bank sends to a corporate customer to report the previous day's end-of-day statement for an account. It includes the opening balance, every booked transaction, a narrative line for each one, and the closing balance, all in a standardized tag-based structure.
No. MT940 is the legacy SWIFT FIN format with fixed tags and a free-form narrative field, while camt.053 is the modern ISO 20022 XML statement with structured fields, including more reliable remittance information. SWIFT is migrating from MT series to ISO 20022, and most banks now support both formats during the transition.
MT940 is the SWIFT format used widely in Europe and for cross-border reporting, while BAI2 is the flat-file format defined by the Bank Administration Institute and used predominantly in the United States. Both deliver prior-day statements, but they use different structures, code sets, and conventions, so multinational groups typically need to handle both.
The :86 field is the information to account owner, a narrative line that carries remittance details, counterparty names, and references. It is hard to parse because banks format it differently. Some use structured key-value subfields, others use free text, and invoice numbers can be truncated or split across continuation lines, which makes deterministic parsing alone unreliable.
Yes. MT940 is one of the most common inputs to enterprise cash application, especially in Europe and in multinational operations. AR teams parse the :61 transaction lines for amounts and dates and the :86 narrative for invoice references, then match those receipts to open invoices to clear AR.
SWIFT's migration to ISO 20022 for cross-border payments is rolling out through 2025 to 2028, with timing that varies by jurisdiction and bank. Most banks already support camt.053 alongside MT940, and corporates are gradually moving over. MT940 will remain in active use for several more years, and many treasury and AR platforms will keep supporting both formats during the transition.
