By Alexander Saeedy

Citigroup accidentally moved to transfer $81 trillion to a customer. Yes, trillion.

A bank employee mistakenly entered the absurdly high figure last year while trying to manually input a transfer to a client's escrow account, the bank said.

"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," Citi said in a statement. "Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank."

The bank doesn't even have $81 trillion in assets that it could send. (The annual GDP of the United States is estimated at around $25 trillion, for reference). How the "fat finger" transfer could even happen is a lesson in the technical difficulties that have kept Citi under regulatory consent orders.

-- Step 1: Sanctions. Citi was supposed to transfer $280 to an escrow account in Brazil but the move is held up for a sanctions check. That transfer was cleared, but Citi's internal systems still had trouble moving the funds.

-- Step 2: Flawed manual processes. A Citi employee had to type in the number for the transfer. But the form, for technical reasons, automatically populates with a whole bunch of zeroes in place. The employee would normally have to delete all the zeros and enter the correct amount, but failed to do so. Instead, the employee accidentally entered $81 trillion.

-- Step 3: Failed oversight. A second person at Citi reviewed the transaction and approved it (Revlon flashback, anyone?). It took a third person 90 minutes to see the error and reverse it. The bank then told the regulators about the issue voluntarily.

This is why banks are getting rid of manual processes but the work is expensive and time consuming and Citi has a lot left to do.

"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 through our transformation," Citi said.

Citi's statement confirmed an earlier report by the Financial Times.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 28, 2025 10:44 ET (15:44 GMT)

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