A Citigroup attempt to credit a client's account with just $280 went wildly wrong, with the financial services giant crediting it with $81 trillion instead, the Financial Times has reported. The colossal error undermines the company's drive to convince regulators that it has rectified operational shortcomings that have plagued it for years.
The error went undetected by a payments worker, and a bank official responsible for checking the payment before it was approved for processing as the next business day began. It was only 90 minutes after posting that a third Citigroup employee saw something terribly wrong with the bank's cash balances, the Times reports, citing an internal summary of the incident it obtained, along with the recollection of two people knowledgable of the mega-mistake. No money actually left the bank.
The "near miss" was kept secret from the public and investors for nearly a year, as it happened last April. Citi did disclose it to both the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). In its defense, Citi said “detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry,” adding that those controls “would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank."
A near miss is defined as the processing of a wrong-amount transaction in which the institution eventually recovers the funds. Citi may well be the near-miss king, with 10 near misses of $1 billion or more in 2024 alone, after racking up 13 in 2023, the Times reports.
“While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating control," said Citi.
The Times' sources say the trouble started with a computer-screen that blocked four transactions heading for an escrow account in Brazil. That screen flagged the payments as potential violations of the US government's sprawling sanctions regime. To bypass that obstacle, Citi's tech team told a processor to manually input the $280 credit with a rarely-used workaround process in which the amount field defaults to 15 zeroes that have to be manually deleted. In this case, some of those zeroes clearly weren't. It's not clear why the numerals of the intended $280 don't align with the erroneous $81 trillion credit.
To put the $81 trillion in perspective, consider that the current M2 measure of US money supply is "only" $21.5 trillion. The Times' revelation of that error comes almost five years after Citi accidentally sent $900 million to creditors involved in a fight over Revlon debt. Rather than making a $7.8 million interest payment on behalf of Revlon, Citi paid off the entire loan balance. Several creditors refused to return the money. Despite intense litigation, Citi was unable to recover $500 million.
That debacle toppled then-CEO Michael Corbat, and the firm was showered with fines and served with consent orders under which regulatory agencies demanded the firm address its operational shortcomings under the agencies' tight, intrusive supervision.
In a memorable 2022 incident, a Citi employee singlehandedly triggered a flash crash in European equity markets with a keying error that initiated the unintended sale of a massive $444 billion basket of stocks from 13 different countries. UK regulators last year fined Citi the equivalent of $78 million for the disaster.
Citigroup is still plagued by problems -- and paying a dear price. Last year the Fed and OCC hammered the firm with $136 million in fines for its inability to rectify risk control and data management issues. Corbat successor Jane Fraser says that remedying the rolling regulatory clusterf*ck is her "top priority." The Times report will do little to bolster the confidence of regulators or customers.
