Citigroup Mistakenly Credited a Customer with $81 Trillion Instead of $280: 'Inputting Error' An employee caught the mistake quickly, but the bank has recently made other errors that have drawn scrutiny and fines from regulators.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- Citigroup accidentally posted a payment of $81 trillion to a customer's account instead of $280.
- An employee caught the mistake, leading the bank to reverse the transaction before the funds were transferred.
- Citigroup said the issue was an inputting error, and that the transaction was so large it would not have gone through anyway.
Citigroup made the mistake of crediting $81 trillion to a customer's account instead of $280, according to a Friday report from the Financial Times.
The multi-trillion-dollar error occurred in April 2024 and was overlooked by both a payments employee and a second employee assigned to check the transaction before it was approved to be processed. A third employee caught the mistake 90 minutes after the payment was posted, leading Citigroup to reverse the transaction several hours after it had been submitted, per the outlet.
The value of the transaction far exceeds the gross domestic product of every country in the world, including the $29.72 trillion GDP of the U.S. It also surpasses Citigroup's own $147 billion market capitalization.
No funds left the bank. Citigroup disclosed the "near miss," or the term for a bank processing a wrong amount but recovering the funds, to the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
A Citigroup spokesperson told Business Insider that the incident was an "inputting error" and that there was "no impact to the bank or our client." They also stated that the transaction was so large it could not have been processed.
"Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry," a Citigroup spokesperson told BI.
The bank also told the FT that it would push to eliminate manual entry and work on automating the inputting process.
Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser. Photographer: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This isn't the first time Citigroup has made a massive inputting error. FT reported that 10 near misses of $1 billion or more occurred at Citigroup last year, down from 13 cases in 2023.
In August 2020, Citigroup accidentally sent $900 million to the creditors of cosmetics company Revlon instead of a $7.8 million interest payment. It took the bank two years of legal action to recover most of the money. The episode led to the early retirement of then-CEO Michael Corbat and a fine of $400 million from U.S. regulators over "unsafe and unsound banking practices."
Citigroup's current CEO, Jane Fraser, stated when she was named to the CEO role in September 2020 that she would work to ensure that employees "operate in a safe and sound manner" by investing in infrastructure, risk management, and controls.
Two years later, a Citigroup employee accidentally added an extra zero to a trade, sparking a stock selloff that wiped out about 300 billion euros, or $322 billion, from European stocks. British regulators fined Citigroup about 62 million pounds, or around $78 million, over the issue last year.
Related: Citigroup Eliminated More Jobs This Week. Here's Which Roles Were Affected.
U.S. regulators also fined Citigroup $136 million last year for not correcting gaps in operations.
Citigroup isn't the only major bank that has incurred fines over operations. JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S. with $3.9 trillion in assets, was fined nearly $350 million in March 2024 by U.S. regulators for operating trades "without adequate oversight."
