Priyanka Tiwari
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Citigroup Account: Errors during transactions are normal. But what happens when the error is from the bank's side? Citigroup was involved in a similar situation. Citigroup does one of the biggest blunders in history by depositing 81 trillion dollars (7,08,51,14,55,00,00,000 rupees) in a account instead of paying 280 dollars (24,492 rupees). This incident, like most, happened due to the age old operational blunder the bank had. Unfortunately, this was not corrected for a long time.
They managed to catch the error after one and a half hours
This theory was reported on by Financial Times, claiming that the incident occurred in the month of April during the previous financial year. Once the payment was started by the bank official, a different officer was supposed to approve it. For some reason, neither of the two were able to spot the blunder. Fortunately, one and a half hours later, a third employee who had not submitted his payment request was able to spot the error. As noted earlier, this transaction was undone in the same few hours.
What was the feedback provided by the bank?
Citigroup has mentioned that their safety system Logs this fault in real time worked XXX into correcting it. The bank stated that with their control system being so robust, the money did not leave the bank at all. The bank claimed, this error did not lead to any cost to the bank or the customs. From this however it is evident that we will have to move away from doing things manually and move towards intelligent systems.
Such errors are not new
Citigroup has not has such issues in the past. Previously, in the year of 2023, the bank made 10 such errors. In these, an employee was making transfer where more money then was intended was to be transferred but there was a timely intervention. There were 13 such incidents in 2022. Because such error are not mandated to be reported, official data for such incidents does not exist. According to banking professionals, incorrect transactions exceeding a billion dollars, is not common.
Earlier there was a blunder of 900 million dollars.
In 2020, Citigroup attempted to withdraw funds from a specific account, but only came to realize later that they had incorrectly sent 900 million dollars to a different account. This attempt was also declined in court. Citibank faced the need to pay a sizable fine and Michael Corbett as a CEO had to step down from his position.
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