MT103 is the SWIFT message type for a single customer credit transfer — one payment, one payer, one payee, sent between financial institutions. It is the document to ask your bank for when a cross-border payment has not arrived, because it records the ordering customer, the beneficiary, the amount and currency, the chain of correspondent banks, the charging arrangement between payer and payee, and the reference the beneficiary’s bank will match against. A beneficiary who cannot find the funds can often trace them from that reference. One caveat worth carrying: SWIFT’s messaging has been migrating to the ISO 20022 family, so an MT103 may no longer be the message actually carrying a given payment even where people still use the name.
Why nothing is quoted here. This lexicon quotes only text it has actually read, from the body that issued it. The instrument described above has a real owner, named in the paragraph, but that owner does not publish the operative wording openly, and reproductions circulating on brokers’, carriers’ and consultants’ websites are not the issuing body’s publication and are not treated as the source. So this entry describes the instrument’s role and structure and stops there. For the wording that will actually govern your transaction, go to the issuing body — and read the version your contract incorporates, since these texts are revised.