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Technological Thoughts by Jerome Kehrli

Dissecting SWIFT Message Types involved in payments

by Jerome Kehrli


Posted on Friday Apr 05, 2019 at 11:40AM in Banking


In my current company, we implement a state-of-the art banking Fraud Detection system using an Artificial Intelligence running on a Big Data Analytics platform. When working on preventing banking fraud, looking at SWIFT messages is extremely interesting. 98% of all cross-border (international) funds transfers are indeed transferred using the SWIFT Network.
The SWIFT network enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment. Many different kind of information can be transferred between banking institution using the SWIFT network.

In this article, I intend to dissect the key SWIFT Messages Types involved in funds transfers, present examples of such messages along with use cases and detail the most essential attributes of these payments.


These key messages are as follows:

  • MT 101 - Request for Transfer
  • MT 103 - Single Customer Credit Transfer
  • MT 202 - General Financial Institution Transfer
  • MT 202 COV - General Financial Institution Transfer for Cover payments

This article presents each and every of these messages, discuss their typical use cases and details key SWIFT fields involved.

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