Citigroup erroneously credited $81 trillion to a client's account but the money never left the bank in the "near miss," which occurred in April, Financial Times first reported late Thursday.
The bank made the error when trying to send the client $280 in an internal transfer, according to the newspaper, which saw an inside account of the event and also cited two people familiar with the matter. Two Citi employees missed the error, but a third found it within 90 minutes and the transfer was reversed hours later, according to the article.
Citi notified the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, another source told the newspaper. Citi had 10 near misses involving $1 billion or more each last year, according to the article, which cited an internal report.
The near mishap came as Citi seeks to reassure regulators that it has repaired risk control issues, according to the paper.
The newspaper quoted Citi as saying its “detective controls" found the "inputting error" and would have prevented any money from leaving Citi. The bank also said the episode underscores its ongoing efforts to eliminate manual processes. People familiar with the error attributed it to an input error and a user-unfriendly backup system, Financial Times reported.
After a tech team told a payments processing worker to manually enter four relatively small transactions that had been stuck in the bank's system, the program the employee used pre-populated the amount section with 15 zeroes — and the employee didn't delete them as necessary — according to the newspaper's account.
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