The camt family: cash management & investigations
camt messages handle cash reporting and the awkward questions — camt.056 asks for a payment back, camt.029 carries the answer.
L0 Explain simply
Analogy: if pacs messages are the freight moving between depots, camt messages are the depot's office paperwork. Some of it is routine reporting — the end-of-day list of everything that arrived and everything that left, so the books can be checked. And some of it is correspondence about problems: a camt.056 is the letter that says "we sent you parcel 4711 by mistake — please send it back", and a camt.029 is the reply, which might be "certainly, it is on its way" or "we cannot; the recipient has already opened it." Asking is easy and standardised. Actually getting the parcel back depends entirely on what the other depot answers.
L1 Core concepts
camt stands for cash management, and the family covers two quite different jobs. Account reporting messages carry balance and entry information from an account servicer to the account owner — the ISO 20022 successors to statement formats like the MT940. Exceptions and investigations messages manage what happens after a payment goes wrong: camt.056, the FI-to-FI payment cancellation request, asks a downstream agent to stop an in-flight payment or give back a settled one; camt.029, the resolution of investigation, carries the answer — cancelled, funds being returned, or a refusal with a reason. Both sides reference the original transaction identifiers, so every party can tie the case to the exact payment it concerns.
L2 Practitioner view
The point practitioners must internalise: a camt.056 is a request, never an instruction. Once a payment has settled, the money sits with the beneficiary's bank or the beneficiary, and no message format can demand it back. The receiving side investigates — often needing the beneficiary's consent — and answers with a camt.029. If funds do come back, they travel in a pacs.004 return, not in the camt itself. Correlation discipline matters: case references, original identifiers, and the UETR must line up, or investigation teams end up matching by amount and date. Obligations and timelines vary by rail — a SEPA recall follows the EPC rulebook's defined process, while cross-border cases follow correspondent practice — so the same message carries different expectations on different rails.
L3 Technical details
Inside the messages: a camt.056 carries an assignment (who is passing the case to whom), a case identifier, the original group and transaction references including the original UETR, and a cancellation reason code from the external code set — duplicate submission, suspected fraud, and technical error are the common ones. The camt.029 mirrors the case and states an investigation status; a refusal carries its own reason code. Two traps. First, a camt.029 confirming cancellation is not money: reconciliation should wait for the pacs.004 or the actual account entry. Second, cases can chain across several agents, and each hop may reassign the case identifier — end-to-end tracking depends on preserving the original transaction references rather than the hop-level case ones.
L4 Standards & sources
Where these are defined. The base definitions of camt.056 (FI-to-FI payment cancellation request) and camt.029 (resolution of investigation) are registered in the ISO 20022 catalogue under the camt business area, which fixes their case-assignment structures, reason-code slots, and original-transaction references. For cross-border correspondent traffic, the CBPR+ usage guidelines profile both messages — pinning versions, narrowing code lists, and defining how a case must reference the original payment. A sourcing caution: the element-level CBPR+ guidelines are published on SWIFT's MyStandards platform, which requires registration; public descriptions — including ours — rely on summaries rather than the guideline text. When an investigation turns on a specific element or code, check the current guideline on the platform — other rails profile the same catalogue messages differently.
Sources & standards2
- Official requirement
ISO 20022 Catalogue of messages ↗ — ISO 20022 Registration Authority · camt business area message definitions
Each message set is described by a Message Definition Report; earlier versions remain available in the ISO 20022 messages archive.
- Market practice
Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) usage guidelines ↗ — Swift (CBPR+ working group) · camt.056 and camt.029 usage guidelines on MyStandards (public summaries)
Full guidelines require MyStandards access; content here relies on public summaries. MT-to-CBPR+ translation rules are published on Swift's translation portal.
Sources for this topic3
- Official requirement
ISO 20022 Catalogue of messages ↗ — ISO 20022 Registration Authority · camt business area message definitions
Each message set is described by a Message Definition Report; earlier versions remain available in the ISO 20022 messages archive.
- Scheme-specific rule2025 version 1.1 (EPC125-05)
2025 SEPA Credit Transfer rulebook ↗ — European Payments Council · recall procedure
Version 1.1 replaced version 1.0 at publication on 5 October 2025 and is stated to remain in effect up to 21 November 2027. It moves the date from which the unstructured address format is no longer permitted to 15 November 2026.
- Simplified educational illustration
Payments Signal editorial teaching models — Payments Signal
What this simplifies: We describe camt.056 and camt.029 generically across rails; the binding procedures, response expectations, and time limits are defined per scheme or by correspondent practice, and differ between them.
Used wherever diagrams, scenarios, figures, or example values are didactic constructions rather than sourced facts; every such use carries a simplifications disclosure. All people, companies, banks, and list entries in examples are fictional.
Deepest material on this page: L4 — Standards & sources. Where a topic stops short of implementation depth, that is a deliberate coverage decision, not an oversight — see coverage.