Citigroup credits client’s account with $81tn in ’fat finger’ mistake

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An error almost led to a Citigroup account being credited with $81tn (€77.8tn) – an amount that is about 5 times the total wealth of the UK, which was estimated at €14.7tn in 2023 by ONS. In other words, enough to buy up the world’s richest man Elon Musk’s assets 200 times.

The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April, was initially missed by two employees, one of whom was assigned to check the transaction.

The first employee had to go through a rarely-used back-up screen following another system’s fault to send $280 (€269) to a client’s account. One quirk of the rarely-used screen was that the amount field came pre-filled with 15 zeros, something that would have to be deleted but that did not happen, reported the  Financial Times, citing information from an internal account of the event seen by them.

The error was eventually spotted by a third bank employee about 90 minutes after it was posted, and the payment was reversed.

No funds left the bank, which itself is worth far less than the transfer amount, Citigroup’s market capitalisation is around $150bn (€144bn). 

Citi disclosed the so-called “near miss”  to the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. A “near miss” event is when a bank accidentally credits the wrong amount but can rectify the mistake before the transfer actually takes place. 

The bank told the FT that its “detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry” and that these mechanisms “would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank”. 

It added: “While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls.”

A payment of this size is unlikely to go through, but it is the latest in a series of errors, Citigroup has been having difficulties remedying. 

The bank had a total of 10 such errors of $1bn or greater only last year, and 13 during the previous year, reported the FT citing internal documents. 

The numbers suggest that Citigroup has been struggling to fix its operational problems nearly five years after it mistakenly sent $900m to the cosmetics group Revlon.

This incident led to a legal battle and the ousting of then-CEO Michael Corbat at the time.