MT 202 Explained: General Financial Institution Transfer

MT 202 is a general-purpose bank-to-bank transfer — used either to settle the interbank leg that sits behind a customer payment (an underlying MT 103) or to move funds on behalf of another financial institution entirely. It's the workhorse message of correspondent banking settlement.

Key fields

• 20 — Transaction Reference: Reference for this transfer.
• 21 — Related Reference: Links back to the underlying payment this transfer is settling, if any.
• 32A — Value Date/Currency/Amount: When and how much settles.
• 52a — Ordering Institution: The bank that originally requested the transfer.
• 53a / 54a / 56a / 57a — Correspondent Chain: The same routing roles as in MT 103 — sender's correspondent, receiver's correspondent, intermediary, and account-with institution.
• 58a — Beneficiary Institution: The bank that ultimately receives the funds (a bank, not a customer — that's the key difference from MT 103's field 59).
• 72 — Sender to Receiver Information: Free-text instructions between the banks.

Because MT 202 carries no mandatory customer-identifying fields, using it to settle a customer payment without the underlying customer details raised transparency concerns — which is exactly what MT 202COV was created to fix.