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.
L0 Explain simply
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.
L1 Core concepts
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.
L2 Practitioner view
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.
L3 Technical details
An MT940 carries :20: reference, :25: the account identification, :28C: statement and sequence number, :60a: opening balance, a repeating :61: statement line, and :62a: closing balance. Each :61: line packs the value date, entry date, a debit or credit mark, the amount, a transaction type code, and the servicing bank's reference, with an optional :86: field carrying free-format detail for the account owner. Options on the balance fields (F final, M intermediate) distinguish complete statements from partial ones. An MT910 carries :20:, :21: the related reference, :25: the account, and :32A: value date, currency, and amount, plus ordering party details. Full formats and validation rules are in the SWIFT Standards MT Category 9 documentation on swift.com, which requires a SWIFT user account.
Sources & standards1
- Official requirement
Swift Standards MT (annual standards releases) ↗ — Swift · Category 9 — MT910, MT940
Full field-level specifications live in the Swift Knowledge Centre User Handbook behind a swift.com login; content here relies on public summaries. Swift ended MT-to-ISO 20022 coexistence for in-scope cross-border payment instructions (for example MT103 and MT202) in November 2025; MT statement messages are being phased out on a separate timeline.
Sources for this topic2
- Official requirement
Swift Standards MT (annual standards releases) ↗ — Swift · Category 9 — MT910, MT940
Full field-level specifications live in the Swift Knowledge Centre User Handbook behind a swift.com login; content here relies on public summaries. Swift ended MT-to-ISO 20022 coexistence for in-scope cross-border payment instructions (for example MT103 and MT202) in November 2025; MT statement messages are being phased out on a separate timeline.
- Simplified educational illustration
Payments Signal editorial teaching models — Payments Signal
What this simplifies: The alert-and-statement analogy compresses category 9: statement processing in practice involves per-bank formatting dialects, and interim statements and debit confirmations are only mentioned, not covered.
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: L3 — Technical details. Where a topic stops short of implementation depth, that is a deliberate coverage decision, not an oversight — see coverage.