MT940 (SWIFT Customer Statement Message)
MT940A SWIFT FIN message used by banks to deliver end-of-day account statements to corporate and institutional customers, containing opening balance, transaction detail, and closing balance for one account.
MT940 is the workhorse end-of-day statement format on the SWIFT network. Each MT940 covers a single account for a single statement period and contains four key field groups: 20 (transaction reference), 25 (account identification), 60F/62F (opening and closing book balances), and a sequence of 61 (statement line) plus optional 86 (information to account owner) pairs for each transaction.
MT940 transactions are coded using SWIFT transaction-type identifiers (e.g. NTRF for transfer, NCHK for cheque, NMSC for miscellaneous), which are useful for classification but not standardised enough to drive deterministic matching alone. The 86 field carries free-text remittance information that often contains the invoice number or counterparty reference a corporate needs.
MT940 is being progressively superseded by ISO 20022 camt.053 under SWIFT's MX migration, but it remains widely used in 2026, especially among regional banks and in legacy ERP integrations. A reconciliation platform handling international cash management must support both formats and reconcile them against the same set of expected receipts.