MT942 vs camt.052: The Two Intraday Bank Reporting Formats

Last updated July 2026.

MT942 and camt.052 are the same thing in two file formats: an interim transaction report a bank sends during the day so you can see cash moving before the day closes. MT942 is the older SWIFT message built from colon tags, and camt.052 is its ISO 20022 replacement built from named XML elements. They carry the same intraday activity, apply the same floor limit idea, and neither one gives you an audited closing balance. The difference that matters for a treasury team is how much parsing work each one takes to turn into a usable position.

MT942 vs camt.052 at a glance

Both are reporting messages, not payment instructions, and both are the intraday sibling of an end of day statement. MT942 pairs with the MT940 statement, and camt.052 pairs with the camt.053 statement. Here is where the two intraday formats line up and part.

Which is easier to work with?

camt.052 is easier to reconcile and harder to eyeball. Because it is XML, every value has a named tag: the amount, the credit or debit indicator, the counterparty, and the remittance information each sit in their own element. Your ERP maps those once and never has to guess. MT942 compresses the counterparty and reference into the free text of tag 86, so any system reading it has to pull those apart with pattern matching, and every bank formats that free text a little differently. The trade off is that a person can skim an MT942 in a text editor, while camt.052 XML is dense and nested and needs flattening before a human reads it. For a machine feed, camt.052 wins. For a quick manual look, MT942 is faster.

The floor limit applies to both

Both formats report only entries at or above a floor limit, so neither one is a complete list of the day's activity. In MT942 the floor sits in tag 34F, and a bank can send two of them so the debit floor and credit floor differ. camt.052 carries the same threshold in the report header. This is the single most common source of confusion: the intraday report shows the large wires and skips the small card payments, so its totals will never match the end of day statement line for line. That is by design, not a data error.

How the fields map

If you already read MT942 and are moving to camt.052, most of the work is learning the new element names. The mapping is direct.

Which format should you ask your bank for?

If you are building or replacing an intraday feed today, ask for camt.052. It is the current ISO 20022 standard, it needs the least mapping maintenance, and it carries structured remittance data your reconciliation can match on. If your bank only offers MT942, or you are keeping an existing feed running, MT942 is perfectly usable as long as you account for the floor limit and parse tag 86 carefully. Many US treasury teams still receive MT942 in 2026 because their banks have not finished migrating intraday feeds, so plan to handle both for a while yet.

Getting either one into a spreadsheet

To position cash you need the entries as rows you can sort and total, not as tag text or nested XML. Upload the interim report and the MT942 to Excel converter reads the tag 61 lines, the 34F floor limit, and the 90D and 90C totals into a clean sheet, while the camt.053 to Excel converter flattens camt.052 and camt.053 XML the same way. Once the rows are in place, stack several reports across the day to build a running position, and check your debit and credit sums against the report totals. For the end of day side of the same relationship, the MT940 to Excel converter handles the closed statement, and the bank file format converter compares every format if you are not sure what your bank sent. Teams that also need board-ready numbers on top of the raw activity often build them straight from the converted rows with an AI financial statement generator.