MT 101 Explained: Request for Transfer

MT 101 lets a customer — typically a corporate treasury — instruct its bank to execute one or more payments, and lets one bank send that instruction on a customer's behalf to another bank where the customer also holds an account. It's the backbone of centralised cash management: a parent company's treasury can debit a subsidiary's account at Bank B while sitting at Bank A, without needing a local user login at Bank B for every payment.

Key fields

• 20 — Sender's Reference: The reference for the whole request message.
• 21R — Customer Specified Reference: An optional reference the corporate itself assigns to the entire batch of transfers.
• 28D — Message Index/Total: Which part of a multi-part request this is, since a single instruction can span several linked MT 101s.
• 50a — Instructing Party / Ordering Customer: Who's authorising the debit — the corporate treasury itself, or the underlying account holder if different.
• 52a — Account Servicing Institution: The bank where the debited account is actually held (which may not be the bank receiving the MT 101).
• 59a — Beneficiary: Repeated once per payment within the message — who's actually getting paid.
• 32B — Currency/Transaction Amount: Repeated per payment.
• 71A — Details of Charges: OUR/SHA/BEN, same meaning as in MT 103.

An MT 101 doesn't move money by itself — the receiving bank actually executes each payment as a normal transfer (often generating its own MT 103 to the ultimate beneficiary's bank). Think of MT 101 as the instruction, and MT 103 as the execution.