camt.053

camt.053 is the identifier of the ISO 20022 message called Bank-to-Customer Statement. It is an electronic account statement, written in XML, that a bank sends to its customer, most often once a day after the close of business, showing the opening and closing balances of an account and every transaction booked during the period. Companies, payment firms and other banks load camt.053 files into their accounting and treasury systems to reconcile their books automatically.

The message belongs to the "camt" (cash management) business area of ISO 20022, alongside the intraday report camt.052 and the debit and credit notification camt.054. It is the ISO 20022 counterpart of the long-established SWIFT MT message MT940 for customer statements, and of MT950 for statements between banks. Because ISO 20022 is now the standard for most major payment systems, camt.053 is gradually replacing MT940 and national statement formats.

A camt.053 file has a fixed hierarchy of elements, each with a short XML tag:

• Group header. Gives a message identification and creation date and time, and may say how many pages or messages make up the full statement.
• Statement. One or more statements, each for a single account, with a statement identification, sequence number, period and the account details, such as the IBAN, currency and owner.
• Balances. Several balance types, identified by codes, typically including the opening booked balance, closing booked balance and closing available balance, sometimes with forward available balances for coming days.
• Transaction summary. Optional totals of credits and debits, with counts.
• Entries. One entry per booking on the account, giving the amount, currency, credit or debit indicator, status, booking date, value date and a bank transaction code that classifies the type of transaction.
• Entry details. For each entry, one or more transaction details with references such as the end-to-end identification set by the payer, the names and accounts of the related parties, charges, exchange rates and remittance information.

An important feature is batch booking. If a company sent one payment file with many supplier payments, the bank may book them as a single debit entry, while the entry details break it down into each underlying transaction. This lets the customer match the statement to individual invoices.

The main use is bank reconciliation. Accounting systems and treasury management systems import the daily camt.053, use payment reference matching to pair each entry with open invoices, payments or ledger items, and flag anything that does not match. The rich references and remittance data in ISO 20022 make automatic matching more accurate than with older formats, which often truncated or dropped such data. Treasury teams also use the closing balances to build daily cash positions across banks and countries as part of cash management, and auditors may request statement files as evidence of balances at period end. Banks use the interbank version of the statement to reconcile their nostro accounts with correspondents.

Banks deliver camt.053 files through several channels: the SWIFT network for large corporates and banks, host-to-host file transfer links, the EBICS protocol widely used in Germany, France and Switzerland, online banking downloads and, increasingly, APIs. Many banks offer several versions of the message, since ISO 20022 messages are updated over time, and customers must agree on the version and any market-specific usage guidelines, such as those of national banking associations or the Common Global Implementation initiative for corporates.

MT940 is a text-based SWIFT format with limited field lengths and a single free-text area for transaction details, which banks filled in different ways. camt.053 carries the same basic information but in a structured, extensible form. Advantages include separate fields for each party and reference, structured remittance information, support for long names and addresses, standard transaction codes and the ability to report the details of batch bookings. The main disadvantages are larger file sizes and the need to update systems that were built to read MT940, a task often handled with help from an MX message conversion layer or by the software vendor. Some banks still offer both formats, and conversion tools translate between them, though information can be lost when converting from camt.053 back to MT940.

Adoption began in European markets where national formats were retired in favour of ISO 20022, notably Switzerland and the countries of the Single Euro Payments Area. It has since spread with the migration of high-value payment systems and of cross-border payments over SWIFT to ISO 20022. For banks, statement and reporting messages were part of SWIFT's move to ISO 20022 for cross-border traffic, which began in March 2023 with a coexistence period for the older MT formats. Corporate adoption has been slower, because changing statement formats affects accounting systems, but the richer data in camt.053 is a major reason companies make the switch, often at the same time as moving payment files to pain.001.

• ISO 20022