camt.027 Claim Non-Receipt: when the money never arrived

The camt.027 Claim Non-Receipt is the ISO 20022 message a creditor bank sends when the money it expected has not arrived, and it is the formal claim that starts a non-receipt investigation. It says, in structured form, that a payment was due on a given value date for a given amount and has not been received, and it asks the debtor bank or the intermediary to find it. It is the successor to the MT192 family of enquiry messages, and unlike a free-format message it carries the exact references, amounts and dates the responder needs to search its own records without asking a human to interpret the question. Source: ISO 20022 camt.027 message definition, and SWIFT CBPR+ usage guidelines for claims and investigations. Why camt.027 exists is that a missing payment is a different problem from a delayed payment, and the two need different handling. A delayed payment is one that is in transit and will arrive, and the answer is a status update. A non-receipt claim is an assertion that the value date has passed and the funds are not there, which means the money is either with the wrong bank, held somewhere in the chain, or never sent, and the investigation must find which one. The claim creates a case with a deadline, because the creditor bank cannot keep the beneficiary waiting indefinitely, and the debtor bank must either prove the money was sent or admit it was not and resend it. The parties are the claimant, usually the creditor bank acting for its customer, and the respondent, usually the debtor bank or the intermediary that was supposed to forward the funds. The beneficiary is the reason for the claim but is not a party to the message, and the debtor is named only as a reference, because the claim is about the interbank leg, not about the customer instruction. In a cover payment the claim can be more complex, because the camt.027 may be about the cover leg, the pacs.009, while the customer payment, the pacs.008, has already arrived, and the two legs must be investigated separately, which is why the claim must name which leg it concerns. How it works is shown by a worked example. On 13 November the funds have not arrived, so the Madrid bank sends camt.027 naming the expected amount EUR 640,000, the value date, the UETR and the original instruction reference. The Frankfurt bank searches its records and finds it sent the pacs.009 cover to its correspondent in New York on 12 November, but the correspondent has not forwarded it, so the Frankfurt bank forwards the claim to the correspondent, which finds the payment held in a queue because of a sanctions screening hit that was never cleared. The claim is what forced the queue to be examined, and the funds are released the same day. On success the claim is answered with the funds, or with a pacs.002 status showing the payment is in transit, or with an admission that the payment was never sent and a new payment with a new value date. On failure the claim goes unanswered, and the creditor bank must escalate: a second camt.027, then a free-format message, then a phone call to the relationship manager, and finally a claim for interest compensation for the late value, because the beneficiary lost the use of EUR 640,000 for a day. The interest claim is a real commercial consequence, and a bank that ignores camt.027 claims will pay it, so the service level for answering a claim is a commercial decision, not just an operational one. The data in a camt.027 is the claim identification, the original payment references including the UETR, the expected amount and currency, the expected value date, the claimant and the respondent, and the reason for the claim. The expected value date is the field that turns a status enquiry into a claim, because a claim asserts that a date has passed without receipt, and a claim sent before the value date is premature and will be rejected as such. A BA must specify the rule that generates a camt.027 automatically when a value date passes without a matching credit, because a manual process will miss claims and the beneficiary will complain first. Edge cases matter. A camt.027 for a payment that was received but credited to the wrong account is not a non-receipt claim at all, it is a misapplied credit, and the correct message is a request to correct the credit, not a claim that the money never arrived. A camt.027 for a payment that was returned must be closed with the pacs.004 return reference, not kept open. A camt.027 where the amount claimed differs from the amount sent by the charges deducted along the way must state the expected amount net of charges, or the respondent will answer that it sent the full amount and the claim will go in circles. The effect on the bank is a disciplined claims queue with ages, owners and service levels, and a measurable reduction in the time a missing payment stays missing. The effect on the customer is the difference between salaries paid on time and salaries paid late, because the EUR 640,000 in the example was salary money, and a one-day delay is a payroll failure. The effect on operations is that every camt.027 must be answered within a defined window, usually one to two business days, and the answer must be factual, with a reference, a status and a next step, not a holding reply. What a BA, PO or SME must understand is that camt.027 is a claim, not a question, and it creates an obligation to answer. The requirement must name the automatic trigger, the fields that identify the expected payment, the responder, the answer deadline, the escalation path and the interest compensation rule. The test is to take one expected payment that did not arrive and trace the claim from the beneficiary bank to the bank that holds the funds, and if the chain cannot be traced, the gap is in the references, not in the goodwill of the banks. Further reading: ISO 20022 camt.027 definition; SWIFT CBPR+ usage guidelines; Paiementor articles on claims and non-receipt investigations. Last reviewed 7 November 2026.