SWIFT or Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication provides a network to allow financial and non-financial institutions (e.g. corporates) to transfer financial transactions through a 'financial message'.
Currently SWIFT's network can support the following message standards:[
SWIFT messages, developed by SWIFT Standards Laboratories Private Limited, consist of five blocks of data including three headers, message content, and a trailer. Message types are crucial to identifying content.
All SWIFT messages include the literal "MT" (Message Type). This is followed by a 3-digit number that denotes the message category, group and type. Consider the following example, which is an order to buy or sell via a third party:
The first digit (3) represents the category. A category denotes messages that relate to particular financial instruments or services such as Precious Metals (6), Treasury (3), or Travelers Cheques (8). The category denoted by 3 is Treasury Markets.
The second digit (0) represents a group of related parts in a transaction life cycle. The group indicated by 0 is a Financial Institution Transfer.
The third digit (4) is the type that denotes the specific message. There are several hundred message types across the categories. The type represented by 4 is a notification.
Overview of SWIFT MT Categories:
