Out of touch! Citigroup nearly caused a blunder: a client requested $280, almost turning it into $81 trillion
Citigroup originally planned to transfer $280 to a client's custody account in Brazil, but due to an operational error, mistakenly entered $81 trillion in the internal system, only for the third employee to notice the issue while checking the bank account balance. This figure not only far exceeds Citigroup's own asset size but is also close to the total global GDP
Citigroup nearly caused a massive transfer blunder, ringing alarm bells for its risk management system.
On Friday, according to the Financial Times, the American banking giant Citigroup recently disclosed a shocking internal transfer error that nearly misallocated a staggering $81 trillion to customer accounts. This figure not only far exceeds Citigroup's own asset size but is also close to the total global GDP.
The incident occurred in April last year when Citigroup intended to transfer $280 to a client's custodial account in Brazil but mistakenly entered $81 trillion in its internal system due to an operational error.
Even more concerning is that this abnormal transaction was initially not detected by the employee responsible for the payment and the second employee responsible for verification, until a third employee noticed the issue while checking the bank account balance 90 minutes later.
Ultimately, the erroneous transfer was reversed hours after it occurred.
Insiders revealed to the media that the direct cause of this "$81 trillion blunder" was human input error and a cumbersome user interface design of a backup system.
The incident originated in mid-March when four payments totaling $280 were intercepted by the system due to triggering potential sanctions violation screening. Although these payments were quickly confirmed to be compliant, they remained stuck in the system and could not be processed normally.
Citigroup's technical team subsequently instructed the employee responsible for payment processing to manually input the transaction into a rarely used backup interface. A flaw in that program was that the amount field was pre-filled with 15 zeros, which needed to be manually deleted, but the operator did not execute this step.
Although Citigroup emphasized that its "detection controls quickly identified the input error between two Citigroup ledger accounts" and stated that the relevant mechanisms "would also prevent any funds from flowing out of the bank," internal reports obtained by the media indicated that Citigroup experienced a total of 10 similar "close-call" incidents (where the bank processed incorrect amounts but ultimately recovered the funds) last year, slightly down from 13 the previous year