Citigroup mistakenly credited $81 trillion instead of $280 to a customer’s account, taking hours to reverse the transaction, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Friday. The incident highlights ongoing operational issues the bank has been trying to resolve.
The error, which occurred last April, went unnoticed by both a payments employee and a second official responsible for verifying transactions before processing. A third employee spotted the mistake one and a half hours after the payment was processed, and the transaction was reversed several hours later, FT said, citing internal records and sources familiar with the matter.
No funds left Citi, which reported the "near miss"—a term for errors that are corrected before funds leave the bank—to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the report said.
Citi told Reuters in an emailed statement that its “detective controls” quickly identified the input error between two ledger accounts and reversed the entry, stressing that the incident had no impact on the bank or the client.
According to an internal report seen by FT, Citi had 10 near misses of at least $1 billion last year, down from 13 the year before. The bank declined to comment to FT on the report.
Last month, Citi CFO Mark Mason acknowledged the bank was increasing investments to address compliance issues related to risk management and data governance.
“We saw the need to invest more in the transformation on data, on technology, on improving the quality of the information coming out of our regulatory reporting,” Mason said.
Last July, Citi was fined $36 million for slow progress in resolving these issues. In 2020, it was fined $400 million for risk and data failures.
Bd-pratidin English/ Jisan
