MT940 and MT942 Statement Messages

Payments get the attention, but a huge share of banking messaging is simply telling account holders what happened to their money. In the SWIFT MT world, two Category 9 messages do most of that work: MT940 and MT942. Anyone building treasury, reconciliation, or cash-management tooling meets them quickly.

What each message is for

Both are statement messages sent from a bank to an account holder (or its service provider), but they cover different windows:

• MT940 is the customer statement — a complete, end-of-day statement of an account, including opening and closing balances and every booked transaction for the period. It is the authoritative daily record used for reconciliation.
• MT942 is the interim transaction report — an intraday message reporting transactions since the last statement or report, used to track activity during the day before the final MT940 arrives.

A useful mental model: MT940 is the closed book for the day; MT942 is a running update while the day is still open.

The key difference: booked versus intraday

The core distinction is timing and finality. MT940 reports booked items with confirmed balances and is typically delivered once per business day after close. MT942 is delivered one or more times intraday and reports movements that have occurred so far, often including items that give an early view of the day's activity. Treasurers use MT942 to make same-day funding and liquidity decisions without waiting for the end-of-day statement.

Reading the fields

Both messages share much of their field structure. Some of the tags you will encounter:

• :20: — transaction reference number for the message.
• :25: — the account identification.
• :28C: — statement and sequence number.
• :60F: / :60M: — opening balance (final or intermediate), present in MT940.
• :61: — a statement line: value date, entry date, debit/credit mark, amount, and transaction type.
• :86: — information to the account owner, carrying narrative and structured details about the preceding :61: line.
• :62F: / :62M: — closing balance, present in MT940.
• :90D: / :90C: — in MT942, the number and sum of debit and credit entries.

A key structural point is that MT940 carries opening and closing balances (the 60/62 fields), which let you prove that opening balance plus movements equals closing balance. MT942, being an intraday snapshot rather than a closed statement, uses a floor-limit and summary approach (the 90D/90C totals) instead of definitive closing balances.

How they are used in reconciliation

The reconciliation pattern is straightforward in principle. Each :61: statement line represents a transaction; the paired :86: field carries the details a system uses to match that line against an expected item — an outgoing payment, an incoming receipt, a fee. Because MT940 includes verifiable opening and closing balances, a reconciliation process can confirm completeness: every movement is accounted for and the arithmetic ties out. This is why MT940 remains the backbone of automated bank reconciliation for corporates.

A practical wrinkle is that the :86: information field is only loosely standardised. Banks populate it differently — some pack structured sub-fields with codes for counterparty name, reference, and transaction type, while others use largely free text. This variability is a perennial source of reconciliation pain, because matching logic tuned to one bank's :86: layout may not read another's cleanly. Teams building multi-bank reconciliation therefore often maintain per-bank parsing rules, and it is precisely this messiness that the more structured ISO 20022 statements aim to reduce.

Where MT94x fits amid ISO 20022

In the ISO 20022 world, the equivalents are the camt cash-management messages: camt.053 corresponds to the end-of-day MT940 statement, and camt.052 corresponds to the intraday MT942 report (with camt.054 for debit/credit notifications). The camt messages carry richer, more structured data — clearly separated references, structured remittance, and defined party roles — which improves auto-matching. But MT940 and MT942 remain extremely common in corporate cash management, and many systems still consume them, so understanding both the legacy MT statements and their camt successors is valuable for anyone in treasury technology.

Key takeaways

• MT940 is the end-of-day statement with full opening and closing balances; MT942 is an intraday interim transaction report.
• MT940 reports booked items for reconciliation; MT942 gives an early, same-day view for liquidity decisions.
• Statement lines live in :61: with details in :86:; MT940 balances sit in the 60/62 fields.
• Verifiable opening-plus-movements-equals-closing arithmetic makes MT940 the backbone of automated reconciliation.
• ISO 20022 equivalents are camt.053 (end of day) and camt.052 (intraday), with richer structured data.