Citigroup almost sent $6 billion to wealth account in copy-paste error, Bloomberg reports

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

(Reuters) -Citigroup nearly credited about $6 billion to a customer’s account in its wealth-management business by accident, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The near-error occurred after a staffer handling the transfer copied and pasted the account number into a field for the dollar figure, which was detected on the next business day, the report added.

Citigroup did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The wealth division’s near-miss was reported to regulators and the company has since set up a tool to help vet large, anomalous payments and transfers, according to the report.

The error was related to an attempted transfer of funds between internal accounts, the report said.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that Citigroup erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer’s account and took hours to reverse the transaction.

Both errors occurred in April, the Bloomberg report said on Monday, adding that the process at the center of the first reported incident has since been fully automated.

In January, Citi cut its closely watched profitability target in 2026 to tackle rising regulatory expenses. The company’s finance chief, Mark Mason, said at the time that the bank is investing more to address its compliance issues, referring to regulatory penalties for risk management and data governance.

In 2020, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve fined Citi $400 million for some risk and data failures. Last year in July, regulators fined Citi $136 million for insufficient progress in tackling those issues.

(Reporting by Bhanvi Satija in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)