On March 3, Reuters reported that Citigroup nearly credited approximately $6 billion to a customer's wealth-management account by mistake, according to sources familiar with the situation cited by Bloomberg News.
The incident occurred when an employee handling the transfer mistakenly inputted the account number in the field meant for the dollar amount. The error was discovered the following business day.
Citigroup has not yet responded to a request from Reuters for comments. The wealth division reported the near-miss to regulators and has implemented a tool to screen large and unusual payments and transfers.
The erroneous transfer was part of an internal funds transfer, as outlined in the report.
In another incident, the Financial Times disclosed that Citigroup mistakenly credited a customer's account with $81 trillion instead of $280, taking hours to rectify the error. Both mishaps occurred in April, with the first incident now being fully automated, as detailed in the Monday Bloomberg report.
In January, Citigroup revised its profitability target for 2026 downwards to address increasing regulatory costs. The company's finance head, Mark Mason, mentioned that Citigroup is intensifying efforts to enhance compliance, specifically targeting risk management and data governance issues that resulted in prior regulatory fines.
In 2020, Citigroup faced a $400 million fine from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve due to data and risk management failures. In July of the following year, regulators penalized Citigroup with a $136 million fine for inadequate progress in resolving these issues.