SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)
SWIFTA member-owned cooperative that provides a secure messaging network used by banks and financial institutions worldwide to send standardised payment, securities, treasury, and trade messages.
SWIFT is the messaging backbone of cross-border banking. It does not move money itself; it transmits standardised messages between member institutions, which then settle through correspondent banking relationships, central-bank systems, or CLS for FX.
The legacy SWIFT message catalog is the FIN MT family — three-digit codes such as MT103 (single customer credit transfer), MT202 (general financial institution transfer), MT940 (statement), and MT950 (statement message for nostro reconciliation). Each MT is a fixed structure with numbered tags.
SWIFT is in the middle of a multi-year migration to ISO 20022 MX messages, which are XML-based and carry richer structured data. From a reconciliation tooling perspective this is one of the largest format-change events of the decade: nostro reconciliation platforms must handle MT940, MT950, and camt.053 simultaneously, often for the same correspondent relationship across the migration window.