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Citigroup credited a $ 81TN customer account when it meant to send only $ 280, an error that could prevent the bank’s attempt to convince regulators that it has fixed long operating issues.
The wrong internal transfer, which occurred last April and was not previously reported, was lost by a payment employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before being approved to be processed at the beginning of the next day.
A third employee revealed a problem with bank account balances, seizing 90 minutes after being posted. The payment returned a few hours later, according to an internal account of the event seen by the Financial Times and two people known to the event.
No fund left Citi, who discovered “Miss Miss” in the Federal Reserve and the Currency Controller Office, according to another person with knowledge of the matter.
The bank said that “its detective checks immediately identified the incoming error between the two Ledger Citi accounts and we returned the entrance” and that these mechanisms “would have also banned any funds from leaving the bank”.
She added: “While there was no impact on our bank or client, the episode underlines our ongoing efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automation of controls.”
A total of 10 close losses – incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount, but is ultimately able to recover funds – from $ 1 billion or larger last year, according to a first internal report by FT. The figure was slightly reduced by 13 a year ago. Citi refused to comment on this wider group of events.
Near missions do not need to be reported to regulators, meaning that there is no comprehensive public data on how often these incidents occur throughout the sector. Some former regulators and bank risk managers said mistakes greater than $ 1 billion were unusual throughout the US banks industry.
The series of errors close to Citi points out how Wall Street Bank is trying to repair its operational problems nearly five years after mistakenly sent $ 900 million to creditors engaged in a controversial battle on the Revlon Cosmetics Group debt.
The wrong payment of Revlon Citi led to the removal of the then executive of Michael Corbat, large fines and the imposition of regulatory consent orders that require her to resolve matters.
Jane Fraser, who took over as the highest executive quoted by Corbat in 2021, has described the regulatory issues of citi as “its main advantage”. However, the group was fined $ 136 million last year by the OCC and the Federal Reserve for failure to correct problems in risk control and data management.
81TN $ Citti near Miss in April was due to an input error and a spare system with a heavy user interface, according to people familiar with the incident. In mid -March, four transactions reaching $ 280 intended for a customer storage account in Brazil were blocked by a screen that captures payments that are possible violations of the sanction.
The payment was quickly cleared, but still remained stuck in the bank system and was unable to end normally.
The Citi Technology team instructed payment processing workers to manually enter the transactions into a spare screen rarely used. One question of the program was that the sum of the sum came pre-populated with 15 voices, which the person entering a transaction had to be deleted, something that did not happen.
