An ISO 20022 XML format
CAMT.053 (short for “Bank-to-Customer Statement”) is part of the ISO 20022 family of financial messaging standards. Unlike older SWIFT-based formats, it is written in XML, with a defined schema that describes exactly where each piece of information belongs. Banks across Europe and beyond use it to deliver account statements electronically, and accounting and treasury software increasingly expect it as an input.
Because it's XML, a CAMT.053 file can be opened in a text editor or web browser, but its nested structure makes it hard to read at a glance — a single transaction can span many lines of tags.
What information it can contain
A CAMT.053 statement typically includes the account identifier (often an IBAN), the statement period, opening and closing balances, and a list of individual entries. Each entry can carry a booking date, a value date, an amount and currency, and remittance information describing what the transaction was for. Bank identifiers such as a BIC may also be present.
Some banks batch several underlying transactions into a single reported entry. When the file includes enough detail — matching amounts that add up to the batch total — those can be split back into individual transactions during conversion; when it doesn't, the batch is kept as one line rather than guessed at.
Schema versions and compatibility
ISO 20022 messages are versioned, and CAMT.053 has gone through several revisions since it was introduced. The version is visible in the file's XML namespace — for example camt.053.001.02, which has been common for years, or camt.053.001.08, which many banks have adopted as part of the wider ISO 20022 migration. In practice, the structural differences between versions rarely change what you need to know as an end user: the same core fields — balances, dates, amounts and references — appear in each version, sometimes under slightly different tag names. A converter built for the CAMT.053 schema family should handle these variations rather than expecting one exact version.
Why convert it to CSV or Excel
Spreadsheets are still where most people reconcile transactions, build budgets, or hand data to an accountant. Converting CAMT.053 to CSV or Excel turns the XML structure into rows and columns: one row per transaction, with dates, amounts and descriptions in consistent columns you can sort, filter or import elsewhere.
Bankfile's CAMT.053 converters do this entirely in your browser — the file is parsed locally and never uploaded, so you can inspect a statement without sending banking data anywhere.