ISO 20022
The international standard for financial messages — payments, statements and more.
ISO 20022 is the international standard for financial messaging: one method and one data dictionary from which banks and payment systems build their messages, usually as XML. Payments, account statements and securities instructions each have ISO 20022 messages with a short code, such as pain.001 for a payment instruction or camt.053 for an end-of-day bank statement.
The codes read as business area, message number and variant. "camt" is cash management (statements, reports and notifications), "pacs" is payment clearing and settlement between banks, and "pain" is payment initiation from a customer to its bank. A suffix such as camt.053.001.08 says which release of the message a bank sends, and each bank publishes an implementation guide for the fields it fills in.
Worked example
A business account can often export the same day as an MT940 text file or as a camt.053 XML file. The camt.053 carries the payer’s name, the remittance reference and a structured bank transaction code in fields of their own, where the MT940 squeezes them into a free-text line of limited length.
Common mistake
Treating ISO 20022 as one file format. It is a family of messages built from one dictionary: a payment instruction (pain.001) and a statement (camt.053) share field names but answer different questions, so a claim of "ISO 20022 support" says little until the message names are listed.
Grounded in ISO — ISO 20022-1:2013, the message scheme metamodel guidance. Figures last checked . General information, not tax advice.
Related terms
camt.053 (ISO 20022 bank statement)
The end-of-day bank statement in ISO 20022 XML.
camt.054 (debit and credit notification)
The ISO 20022 notice that details a debit or credit — often the payments inside a batch.
MT940 (SWIFT customer statement)
The SWIFT end-of-day statement, in tagged plain text.
Open banking connector
Software that moves bank transaction data between systems on published standards.
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Questions about this term
ISO 20022: common questions
- What does ISO 20022 replace in bank reporting?
- In cash management it takes over from the SWIFT MT messages: camt.053 replaces the MT940 end-of-day statement and camt.052 the MT942 intraday report, and in payments pacs.008 replaces the MT103 customer transfer. Many banks offer both families side by side while their customers move across.
- Is ISO 20022 only about payments?
- No. It covers payments, cash management, securities, cards, trade services and foreign exchange. For anyone reading bank data, the cash-management (camt) messages matter most, because they carry the account statements, the intraday reports and the debit and credit notifications.
- Which ISO 20022 message does 2Fin read?
- The camt.053 bank statement. 2Fin reads each entry’s amount together with its credit or debit indicator, so money out never lands as income, and the same import runs in the web app, the Windows app and a self-hosted deployment, alongside MT940, OFX, QIF and CSV statements.
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