What the format is
MT940 is a tagged SWIFT customer statement; CAMT.053 is its richer ISO 20022 XML counterpart. Both carry account, balance, booking, amount, and reference data.
Who uses it
Treasury, accounting, cash-management, ERP integration, and audit teams moving bank statements into spreadsheets or data pipelines.
Common failure modes
- Bank-specific :86: narratives
- Decimal comma and legacy encodings
- Several statements in one file
- Opening plus entries does not equal closing balance
Worked example
For opening 1,000.00, a +250.00 credit and −100.00 debit, the calculated close is 1,150.00. A declared 1,149.99 close produces a loud 0.01 reconciliation failure.