I have had a couple of recurring questions about bank statements recently, and rather than responding to the individuals directly i thought it would be useful to address the question via a post. So, if bank statements are your thing check out my posts about the BAI2 and MT940 file formats.
What is CAMT?
- CAMT is an ISO 20022 Payment Message definition that stands for Cash Management and specifically covers Bank to Customer Cash Management reporting
- Keep in mind that ISO 20022:
- Defines the ISO standards for electronic data exchanges between financial institutions,
- ISO nicely put it as the “Universal financial industry message scheme”
What is the difference between camt.052, camt.053 and camt.054
- camt.052 – Bank to Customer Account Report
- This is your intraday information
- Provides the customer with a near real time view of their account(s)
- The camt.052 replaces the MT942
- camt.053 – Bank to Customer Statement
- This is your previous / prior day bank statement
- Provides the customer with detailed and structured information on all entries booked to their account for the previous day
- The camt.053 replaces the MT940
- camt.054 – Bank to Customer Debit / Credit Notification
- Provides the customer with specific account debit and account credit information
- The camt.054 replaces the MT900 (Confirmation of Debit) and MT910 (Confirmation of Credit) messages
What are the Benefits of CAMT Reporting?
- Using ISO 20022 (XML) and CAMT reporting allows banks and customers to use a standard way of reporting account information globally
- CAMT reporting enables consistency, moving towards a standard where banks populate the information in a specific and defined manner
- Banks can no longer construct an account statement in its own unique way, there are specific tags to report specific information – in BAI2 and MT940 some rows such as Transaction Detail (BAI2, record 16) or Statement Line (MT940, tag 61) can be populated in various and generic ways – each bank having their own flavour
- CAMT messages allow more information to be shared, the CAMT formats will not truncate remittance information for example – this enhanced richer reference and description information about the account credit or account debit facilitates and should improve the bank statement reconciliation process
- CAMT Messages enable flexibility around how you report, allowing customers to receive reporting information in various standardised ways – for example, many APIs are using ISO 20022 standards to exchange information over legacy file formats
- CAMT is a global format leveraging the ISO 20022 XML standards allowing better interoperability with your banks and your internal systems
- The idea being you can move away from multiple bank statement formats – BAI2 mainly in the US, MT940 in most other countries, but in some cases you may also be using local or bank proprietary formats – to just the CAMT reporting standard
- But, of course, you must work with your banks and the appropriate teams that support your internal systems (particularly legacy systems) to ensure compatibility
- The end goal is to enable corporates improve the end to end business process from payments to reconciliation
Hope that helps – please let me know if you would like any other information about the various CAMT reporting messages.