Reuters
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Citigroup accidentally credited $81 trillion to a customer’s account instead of $280, and it took several hours to reverse the transaction. This is a “near miss” that indicates an operational problem at the bank that was attempting to fix it.
The error that occurred last April was missed by an employee and a second official of the payments assigned to check transactions before being processed the next day, the FT said, citing two people familiar with the internal accounts and events.
The third employee caught the error 1.5 hours after the payment was processed, and the transaction was ultimately cancelled a few hours later, the FT said.
No Citi left revealing a near mistake when the bank processed the wrong amount but was able to collect the funds.
Citi told Reuters in an email statement that “Detective Control” quickly identified input errors between the two ledger accounts, reversed the entries, and added that the incident would not affect the bank or client.
According to an internal report seen by the FT, City last year saw over $1 billion in mistakes of over $1 billion. City declined to comment on the report to FT.
Last month, CITI CFO Mark Mason said banks are investing more to address compliance issues and referring to regulatory penalties for risk management and data governance.
“We thought we needed to invest more in data transformation to improve the quality of the information coming from data, technology and regulatory reports,” Mason said.
Last July, Citi was fined $136 million for insufficient progress in tackling these issues, and in 2020, he was fined $400 million for risk and data disruptions.
