SWIFT Message format

This section provides examples on the SWIFT message.

Many financial institutions use the SWIFT standard to automate transaction processing, supports SWIFT, but you must build a message format to suit your needs.

The following example shows a SWIFT MT950 example. Assuming you are interested in capturing data from the Statement Line (tag 61), then your message format might look like that shown below.

SWIFT MT950 example

{1:F01STNDGB20AXXX1285053931}{2:O9501201021106ZYBBHKH0AXXX02160034560211060734N}
{3:{108:305006943}}
{4:
:20:2
:25:0356622B
:28C:18/1
:60F:C060715USD100000,
:61:0607150315C5000,S54126234//10607154321 /US/123456789/SHS/1000,
:61:0607150315D500,FINTNONREF//10513154322 /ISIN/US1234567890/SHS/1000000,
:61:0607150315C500,FPCHNONREF//10513154323 /ASTF/123456789/FMT/500,
:62M:C060715USD105000,
:20:2
:25:0356622B
:28C:18/2
:60M:C060715USD105000,
:61:0607150315C25000,S54126235//10607154324 /ISIN/US1234567891/SHS/500,
:61:0607150315D500,FTRFNONREF//10513154325 TRANSFER TO ACCOUNT 150A
:62M:C060715USD129500,
:20:2
:25:0356622B
:28C:18/3
:60M:C060715USD129500,
:61:0607200620D250000,NPCH2006175//4329487 /GB/5579107/SHS/185,
:61:0607200620C250000,NFEXQ3OMI11TO25EN16H//4938585 /AISO/EUR198313,54
:62F:C060715USD129500,
-}{5:{CHK:1E638E2FF01F}{TNG:}{DLM:}}{S:{COP:P}}
 

A SWIFT message can have up to five blocks. Each block starts with a curly brace ({) followed by the block number (1 through 5) and then a colon (some SWIFT messages use a new line/CRLF character, although this example does not). Block 4 contains the transaction data (un-faded lines in the example above.

Block 4 contains several tags, some of which repeat. The table below, in general terms, lists what each tag is. Using this table and the example above, you can see that there are three transactions (tag 20) for the same account (tag 25) and each transaction has at least two statement lines (tag 61)

For this example, we assume you are only interested in the complete details of the statement line.

In the example above, there are several tag 61s within each message. Therefore, you would want the Repeat Count set to All to capture the information from every instance of tag. The following table lists tag 61 subfields.

See SWIFT documentation for information about tags, their subfields, and their definitions.