The US bank Citigroup accidentally credited a client’s account with $81 trillion when it intended to send just $280 – a “fat finger” error that was caught in time.
The mistake was missed by two employees and detected by a third employee 90 minutes after it was posted.
No funds left the bank, and it was disclosed as a “near miss” to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to the Financial Times.
A transaction of $81 trillion (£64 trillion) is so enormous that it would be unlikely to go through any bank’s systems and would certainly rank as one of the biggest ever fat finger errors, where the wrong number is entered in a computer system.
The entire US stock market
The amount would be more than enough to buy the entire US stock market, which was valued at $62 trillion at the end of 2024, including all major tech companies, at a premium.
It would also be enough to buy all the assets of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, more than 200 times over, with his fortune valued at $343 billion, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.
The total global wealth was estimated at around $450 trillion by UBS last year, while the UK’s total wealth was estimated at $16 trillion in 2022.
What you should know
- A Citigroup spokesperson stated, “Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts, and we reversed the entry.
- “Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds from leaving the bank. While there was no impact on the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to eliminate manual processes and automate controls through our transformation.”
- This incident is not Citigroup’s first fat-finger error. In 2020, the bank accidentally sent $900 million to creditors of the cosmetics company Revlon.
It took two years of legal battles for the bank to recover much of the money from several hedge funds, and the saga contributed to the departure of Citigroup’s chief executive, Michael Corbat.
The bank was fined £61.6m in the UK last year after a banker tried to sell stocks worth $58m in May 2022. However, the fat-fingered trader accidentally sold shares worth $1.4bn, causing a “flash crash” in European stock markets. The unidentified trader scrolled past error messages without reading them.
