Topic archive
Plain-language learning briefs that route you to the key ideas, operational questions, and practical context for this part of the payment ecosystem.
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A resident individual in India sends dollars to a friend's US account: Form A2 and the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, currency conversion at the sending bank, and a serial MT103 that carries both currencies through one US correspondent to the beneficiary's bank.
Directs readers to a detailed learning session about the SWIFT MT103 customer credit transfer message.
Explains how corporates and banks use MT101 transfer requests in practice and how those instructions can lead to customer credit transfers.
Explains how a cover payment funds the bank-to-bank leg with a SWIFT MT202 COV while the customer's MT103 travels separately to the beneficiary's bank, and why the cover message must carry the underlying customer details.
Describes the SWIFT Category 9 messages — the MT900 debit confirmation, MT910 credit confirmation, and MT940, MT942, and MT950 statements — and how they feed reconciliation of the accounts a bank holds at other banks.
When a payment must be questioned, cancelled, or corrected, banks use dedicated exception messages: free-format MT n99 notes, MT n92 cancellation requests, and the ISO 20022 camt.056 and camt.029 pair, supported by SWIFT gpi stop-and-recall.
How a SWIFT MT message is checked before and during sending: mandatory versus optional fields, tags and formats, the network's own cross-field rules, and what a rejection means.
Bank-to-bank funds transfers on SWIFT — the MT202 and MT205 and their ISO 20022 successor pacs.009 — used for cover payments, own-account moves, and market settlement, and how they differ from customer transfers.
Swift MT (Message Type) messages are grouped into numbered categories by business area, from customer payments to securities and cash management, so each message carries a predictable purpose and structure across the network.
Category 7 Swift messages carry documentary credits and guarantees between banks in trade finance, supporting importers and exporters, while the Bank Payment Obligation offers an irrevocable interbank undertaking as an alternative structure.
Beyond payments, Swift carries category 3 treasury confirmations, category 5 securities settlement and reconciliation, and category 6 commodities messages, letting post-trade confirmation and settlement instructions travel over one network.
SWIFT Financial Application (FIN) Category 1 covers customer payments, where a customer is a party to the transfer. This guide walks the MT101, MT102, MT103, and MT104 messages along two axes: single versus multiple, and push versus pull.
SWIFT Financial Application (FIN) Category 2 covers transfers where banks are the parties. This guide separates own-account from third-party transfers, single from multiple, and explains the notice nature of MT210 and the MT202 COV cover message.
SWIFT Category 0 system messages pass between a user and the network itself, not between banks. This guide covers acknowledgements, authentication responses, retrieval and delivery notifications, and why a valid payment can still fail at the network layer.
When a SWIFT MT payment goes wrong, banks use a small family of exception messages — MTn92, n95, n96, and n99 — to ask for cancellation, query, answer, and explain. ISO 20022 replaces this toolkit with camt.056, camt.029, and pacs.004.