Citigroup mistakenly credited a customer’s account with $81 trillion instead of $280 and took several hours to reverse the transaction, highlighting the bank’s operational challenges that it has been working to resolve, according to a report by the Financial Times published on Friday.
The incident, which happened last April, was overlooked by a payments employee and a second official assigned to verify the transaction before it was approved for processing the next day, as reported by FT, referencing an internal document and two sources close to the situation.
A third employee noticed the mistake approximately one and a half hours post-processing, and the transaction was eventually reversed several hours later, FT noted.
No money was transferred out of Citi, which reported the incident — described as a “near miss,” where a bank processes an incorrect amount but can recover the funds — to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the article mentioned.
Citi informed said that its “detective controls” quickly identified the error made when inputting amounts between two ledger accounts and that they reversed the entry, asserting that the incident had no repercussions for either the bank or the client.
According to an internal report obtained by FT, there were ten near misses involving $1 billion or more at Citi last year, a decrease from 13 incidents the previous year. Citi chose not to comment to FT regarding this report.
Citi was penalised $136 million last July for inadequate progress in addressing these concerns, and in 2020, the bank was fined $400 million for various risk and data management failures.
