Letter of Credit Forum

Personally, I am always sceptical of so called MT103/102 (usually stated to be "conditional") messages purporting to serve as a form of payment guarantee. Most of such messages are not recognised as an eligible security by banks. I am sure you are aware that a standard MT103 message is simply a TT payment instruction, which is obviously not a guarantee, but simply an unconditional payment.

A so called "MT103/23" is (as far as I know) a format which would not be recognised by banks. The intention is for the buyer to arrange for the issuance of a SWIFT MT103 message with field 23 claused as "CONDITIONAL" so that the payment is not released/actioned by the recipient bank until certain conditions have been fulfilled, such as say, presentation of documents, evidencing shipment of goods.

It must be understood that such messages are not governed by any ICC provisions, and the manual intervention required under the "CONDITIONAL" flag would affect the "straight through processing" (STP) function of the MT103 message. It is unlikely that the SWIFT/Payment department of a bank would wish to involve itself in an area for which it is not qualified, in determining the integrity of the underlying documents, and thereby lift the condition to pay the seller.   Such messages have been the subject of scams whereby an unscrupulous seller will circumvent the usual secure instruments such as LCs or bank guarantees, and instead rely on the relative ease of receiving payment against a less stringent examination of underlying shipping documents

 Hello Pan

This link may help

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_MT_103-23

 cheers

phill doran

"...in armour bright, the merchant men..." 

Please wait for an expert's opinion.

but AFAIK (as far as I know) and the information I found on the web is that.... MT103 is a specific message format used mainly for trasferring
moneys between customers of different banks or other similar financial
institutions.

if you need more indepth info, like details, fields of the message type, then I think some info is available on the swift website:

http://www.swift.com/solutions/standards/more_information/index.page?lan...