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It is fair to say that most SEPA implementations are focusing on SEPA compliance, and
rightly so! This focus will ensure that corporate payments and direct debit collections can
continue to happen uninterrupted after the SEPA deadline. The spotlight for now is very
much on the corporate to bank space. Less attention is being given the other way, i.e.
bank to corporate. As a bare minimum, I would recommend you to have an
understanding of the SEPA Rejection Reason Codes, R-Transactions or R-Messages.
The other significant area in the bank to corporate space is bank statement
reporting. With SEPA you may be asked questions about the content of your bank
statement file. I am going to assume that the vast majority of corporates are using the
MT940 format for end of day bank statement reporting.
The intention of this post if to provide you with an overview of the MT940 file format. It
should help you to identify in which field a particular value has or has not been sent!
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What is an MT940?
An MT940 is a standard structured SWIFT Customer Statement message. In short, it is an
electronic bank account statement which has been developed by SWIFT. It is a end of
day statement file which details all entries booked to an account.
I’ve deliberately missed out the SWIFT header and footer sections, since here we’re
mostly interested in the MT940 format and data contents.