MT9xx: confirmations and statements
MT910 confirmations and MT940 statements tell a bank what happened on its accounts at other banks — the raw material of reconciliation.
IN ONE LINE
An everyday analogy: think of the accounts your bank holds at other banks as your own current account, just one step removed.
MT9xx messages are the alerts and statements for those accounts.
An MT910 is the push notification: "money just arrived on your account with us".
An MT940 is the statement: every movement on the account, line by line, usually delivered at the end of the day.
And just as you check your statement against the payments you expected, banks check these messages against every transfer they sent and every credit they were promised.
That checking — finding the entries that match and chasing the ones that do not — is reconciliation, and it is a full-time job at scale.
WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
Category 9 MT messages carry cash management information rather than payment instructions.
The MT910, confirmation of credit, is sent by the bank that services an account to the bank that owns it, advising that a specific credit has been booked — often within moments of the booking.
The MT940, customer statement message, reports an account's activity as a formal statement: opening balance, a line for every entry, closing balance, typically produced once per business day.
Together they let a bank see what actually happened on its nostro accounts around the world, as opposed to what its own systems expected to happen.
Related types exist in the same family — including a debit confirmation and other statement variants — but MT910 and MT940 are the two this topic focuses on.
HOW IT WORKS
Practitioners consume MT9xx in two rhythms.
Intraday, MT910s drive time-sensitive decisions: releasing a customer credit, confirming that expected cover for a payment has arrived, or feeding dashboards that track how much liquidity sits on each nostro right now.
End of day, MT940s feed the reconciliation engines: every statement line is matched against the entries the bank's own ledgers expected — an outgoing MT103 here, an incoming cover there.
Whatever fails to match becomes a break, parked in investigation queues or a suspense account until explained.
The quality problems are mundane but constant: statements arriving late, references truncated or reformatted by the servicing bank so automatic matching fails, and duplicated lines after a resend.
How far banks automate this varies widely between institutions.
THE WORDS
- Statement message
- A message reporting what actually hit an account over a period — the record a bank reconciles against, rather than an instruction to move money.
READ FIRST
CONNECTED TO
SOURCES
- Swift Standards MT (annual standards releases) — Swift
- Payments Signal editorial teaching models — Payments Signal
Derived from MT9xx: confirmations and statements. Every claim on this card is sourced on that page.