Category 7: Documentary credits, guarantees and standby letters of credit
MT708 Amendment to a Documentary Credit
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The MT708 carries the part of a documentary credit amendment that does not fit in the MT707. The bank that issues the amendment sends it with the MT707, under the same credit number and amendment number, and it holds the changed wording of the long text fields such as goods, documents and additional conditions.
- Message type
- MT708
- Category
- 7
- Status
- In the current standard
- ISO 20022
- No direct equivalent
What MT708 is used for
The MT708 was added in the November 2018 category 7 release, when the MT707 was rebuilt so that an amendment can change the long text fields of the credit (goods in 45B, documents in 46B and additional conditions in 47B) in a structured way. Long changes that do not fit in the MT707 continue in one or more MT708 messages.
Like the MT701 for the issue, the MT708 is never sent alone: field 27 numbers the series, and the receiving bank must hold the amendment until every part has arrived before it advises the change to the beneficiary.
- Sent by
- The bank that issues the amendment, usually the issuing bank
- Sent to
- The bank that received the MT707, usually the advising bank
Fields
This is a catalogue entry: the field-by-field structure is not shown here because we publish structures only where we have checked them against public sources. Paste an MT708 into the parser to see each field decoded with its tag, name and value.
ISO 20022
No ISO 20022 equivalent in general use. Documentary credit messages in category 7 were not part of the November 2025 move of cross-border payment instructions to ISO 20022 and are still exchanged as MT on Swift.
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