CAMT.053 vs MT940: Differences, Migration Dates, and How to Convert Both

CAMT.053 is the ISO 20022 XML bank statement that replaces the SWIFT MT940 flat text statement. Both report the same thing, the entries booked to your account and the balances either side of them, but MT940 encodes it as positional tags in a text file while camt.053 uses named XML elements. The practical consequence is that camt.053 gives the invoice reference and the counterparty their own dedicated fields, where MT940 buries both in the free text of tag 86.

Last updated July 2026

The short version

If someone hands you a statement file and you need to know what you are looking at: a camt.053 file is XML, opens with a <Document> tag, and nests everything under BkToCstmrStmt. An MT940 file is plain text, and you will see lines beginning :20:, :60F:, :61:, and :62F:. Neither one opens cleanly in Excel, for different reasons.

What is the difference between camt.053 and MT940?

The difference is structure, not content. MT940 is a SWIFT MT message built from numbered tags in a fixed order, designed in an era when every byte on the wire cost money. CAMT.053 is an ISO 20022 XML message where each piece of data has a named element, so software can read a field by its name instead of counting characters. Both carry an opening balance, a list of booked transactions, and a closing balance.

Where it stops being an academic distinction is reconciliation. In MT940, the description, the counterparty, the payment reference, and the bank's own transaction code all get compressed into tag 86, which is free text with a length limit. Your ERP has to parse that text with regular expressions and hope the bank's formatting never changes. In camt.053, the remittance information lives in RmtInf, the transaction is classified by BkTxCd, and the amount's direction is stated explicitly in CdtDbtInd. Nothing has to be inferred.

Field by field: MT940 tags and their camt.053 equivalents

If you are migrating a mapping from one to the other, this is the table you want. The left column is what your old parser reads, and the right column is where the same data now lives.

Is camt.053 a SWIFT message?

Not in the sense people usually mean. MT940 is a SWIFT MT message, part of the proprietary message catalogue SWIFT has run for decades. CAMT.053 is an ISO 20022 message, an open standard maintained by ISO rather than by SWIFT, though it travels over the SWIFT network among others. In SWIFT's own migration language, MT940 and MT950 map to camt.053, MT942 maps to camt.052, and MT900 and MT910 map to camt.054.

camt.053 mt equivalent: the full mapping

The camt family is easy to mix up because the messages arrive from the same bank and look similar. Timing and finality separate them.

Only camt.053 is the statement you reconcile the ledger against, because it is the only one of the three that reports booked entries with final balances.

Why US finance teams started seeing camt.053

For years camt.053 was something a US controller heard about from a European subsidiary. That changed because the plumbing underneath US high value payments changed. CHIPS, operated by The Clearing House, migrated to ISO 20022 on April 8, 2024. The Fedwire Funds Service followed on July 14, 2025, in a single day cutover that retired its legacy FAIM format, after the date had been pushed back from March 10, 2025. The SWIFT MT and ISO 20022 coexistence period on the SWIFT network then ended on November 22, 2025.

None of those milestones forced camt.053 onto your corporate account directly, because what format a bank uses for customer statement reporting is a bank by bank commercial decision. What they did was make every large US bank build ISO 20022 infrastructure, and camt.053 is the statement that falls out of it. If your relationship manager has been nudging you off BAI2 or MT940, that is the reason.

Which camt.053 version will my bank send?

Check the XML namespace on the Document element at the top of the file. It ends with a version tag such as camt.053.001.02 or camt.053.001.08. US banks are not standardized here: Huntington documents camt.053.001.02 for its clients, while newer usage guidelines such as the Payments Canada Lynx collection are written against .08. The elements you care about, Stmt, Ntry, Bal, and CdtDbtInd, are stable across versions. The optional fields around them are not, so read the namespace before you build a parser.

Why neither format opens properly in Excel

MT940 and camt.053 fail in Excel for opposite reasons. Open an MT940 and every line lands in column A, because it is a text file with no delimiter, and a single transaction is spread across a tag 61 line and a tag 86 line beneath it. Open a camt.053 and Excel offers to build a schema from the XML, then either flattens the tree wrong or repeats the parent statement row once for every nested child element.

The camt.053 failure is the more dangerous one, because it produces a spreadsheet that looks plausible. Amounts in camt.053 are always positive numbers; whether a line is money in or money out is carried in a separate CdtDbtInd sibling tag. A naive XML import drops that tag, so every withdrawal reads as a deposit and the column totals are silently, badly wrong.

How to convert camt.053 or MT940 to Excel

Three approaches, in order of how much of your afternoon they cost.

The fastest is a converter that already understands the format. Upload the file to the camt.053 to Excel converter and each entry becomes a row with booking date, value date, amount, debit or credit, description, and reference, with the opening and closing balances lifted out of the Bal blocks. Since the uploader takes text files, rename the .xml copy to .txt first. If your bank sends MT940 rather than XML, the bank statement converter handles that too, and US banks sending BAI2 balance reporting are covered by the BAI to Excel converter.

The second option is to import the file directly into accounting software that speaks the format. More packages do than you would expect: both the Zoho Books and Odoo importers accept camt.053 natively, though neither will look at a PDF. Banks that email statements as attachments each morning make this simpler still, since you can extract the data straight out of the incoming email before anyone opens it by hand.

The third is writing your own parser, which is reasonable if you are loading statements daily into a treasury system and unreasonable for a month end close. If you go that way, read the namespace, read CdtDbtInd, and reconcile your row count against the entry count in the file before you trust a single total.

Should you ask your bank to switch you to camt.053?

If you reconcile by hand in a spreadsheet, the format barely matters and MT940 is a smaller file. If anything downstream matches payments to invoices automatically, camt.053 is worth asking for, because the structured remittance fields are the whole reason auto matching rates improve. The honest caveat is that a bank can populate camt.053 badly, stuffing everything into the unstructured Ustrd element and giving you an XML file with all the disadvantages of MT940 and none of the benefits. Ask for a sample file before you commit to a mapping project, and check whether RmtInf is actually structured.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between camt 053 and MT940?

MT940 is a SWIFT flat text statement built from positional tags such as 60F, 61, and 62F. CAMT.053 is the ISO 20022 XML statement that replaces it, giving each piece of data a named element. The key practical difference is that camt.053 puts the invoice reference and counterparty in dedicated fields, while MT940 compresses them into the free text of tag 86.

Is camt.053 a SWIFT message?

CAMT.053 is an ISO 20022 message, not a SWIFT MT message, although it can travel over the SWIFT network. ISO maintains the standard rather than SWIFT. In SWIFT's own migration mapping, MT940 and MT950 are the legacy equivalents of camt.053, and the MT and ISO 20022 coexistence period on the SWIFT network ended on November 22, 2025.

What is the camt.053 equivalent of MT942?

camt.052, the Bank to Customer Account Report, is the ISO 20022 equivalent of MT942. It carries intraday account information and can include pending items, so it is not the file you reconcile against. Use camt.053 for that, since it reports booked entries only along with final opening and closing balances.

Does camt.053 include pending transactions?

No. CAMT.053 reports booked entries only, meaning transactions already posted to the ledger. Pending and intraday activity belongs to camt.052. This is exactly why auditors and accountants reconcile against camt.053: it is final, whereas an intraday report can still change before the day closes.

Can I open a camt.053 file in Excel?

You can open it, but Excel treats it as generic XML and offers to build a schema, which either flattens the structure incorrectly or duplicates parent rows for each nested child. Worse, amounts are stored as positive numbers with direction held in a separate CdtDbtInd tag, so a naive import totals withdrawals as deposits. Convert the file properly instead.

Will MT940 be discontinued?

Not on a single announced date for customer statement reporting. The SWIFT network's MT and ISO 20022 coexistence ended in November 2025, and US market infrastructures CHIPS and Fedwire have both migrated, but whether your bank keeps offering MT940 statements is its own commercial decision. Many banks still deliver MT940 alongside camt.053 during the transition.