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Citigroup Last year, if you were planning to send just $280, you mistakenly praised a customer’s account for $81 trillion.
The payments made in April last year were missed by two employees, but were caught 90 minutes after it was posted, the Financial Times first reported Friday night. It turned around a few hours later, and was reported as a “near miss” to the Secretary of the Currency Secretary’s Federal Reserve and the office.
The event is the latest mistake revealed by Wall Street Bank, and has struggled to overcome a series of operational errors in recent years.
“Detective control quickly identified input errors between two Citi ledger accounts and reversed the entries despite the fact that payments of this size were not actually possible,” Citi said in a statement to NBC News. “Our preventive controls would have also stopped funding to leave the bank. It had no impact on the banks or clients, but this episode highlights the ongoing efforts to eliminate manual processes and automate control through transformation.”
City did not confirm or provide the number of near misses it had experienced.
Near misses occur when the bank processes the wrong amount but is able to collect the funds. The bank made nearly 10 mistakes last year, more than $1 billion and more than $13 the previous year, according to the report.
The bank has been working to repair its reputation five years ago after sending a $900 million error to creditors who engaged in a controversial battle over cosmetics group Revlon’s debt.
Corbat’s successor Jane Fraser said improved risk and control is a top priority. The bank was fined $136 million last year by regulators for not making enough progress in improving.
