Citigroup mistakenly deposited $81 trillion into a customer’s account instead of $280, an error that took several hours to reverse, exposing operational vulnerabilities the bank has been working to fix.
According to a Financial Times report on Friday, the mistake, which occurred in April 2024, was initially overlooked by a payments employee and a second official responsible for verifying the transaction.
The error was detected one-and-a-half hours later by a third employee, but the reversal process took additional time to complete.
Despite the staggering sum, no funds left Citi, and the bank reported the “near miss”—a term used when an incorrect transaction is caught before funds are lost—to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
In a statement to Reuters, Citi emphasized that its “detective controls” quickly flagged the inputting mistake between two ledger accounts and ensured the reversal had “no impact on the bank or the client.”
The incident adds to Citi’s ongoing efforts to address risk management and compliance failures.
According to an internal report obtained by the Financial Times, Citi had 10 similar near misses of $1 billion or more in 2024, an improvement from 13 incidents the previous year. The bank, however, declined to comment on that report.
Citi’s Chief Financial Officer, Mark Mason, acknowledged in January that the bank is investing more resources to strengthen its regulatory compliance, particularly in data management and technology improvements.
“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.
In July 2024, Citi was fined $136 million for failing to make adequate progress in resolving its risk and compliance shortcomings. This followed a $400 million penalty in 2020 for similar deficiencies.
