The US bank Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send $280 – before the “fat finger” error was caught.
The mistake was spotted only after two employees had missed it, and a third employee rectified it 90 minutes after it was posted, the Financial Times reported. No funds left the bank.
The bank disclosed the “near miss” to the US Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
A transaction of $81tn (£64tn) would be so huge that it would be unlikely to go through any bank’s systems. It would have certainly gone down as one of the biggest ever fat finger errors, in which the wrong number is entered in a computer system.
The sum would be more than enough to buy the entire US stock market, including all of the big tech companies, at a healthy premium. The US stock market was valued at $62tn at the end of 2024, according to the Current Market Valuation website.
The amount would be also be enough to buy all of the assets of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, more than 200 times over. His fortune is valued at $343bn, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.
The total stock of global wealth was estimated at about $450tn by UBS last year. The total wealth of the UK was estimated at $16tn in 2022.
A Citi spokesperson said: “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 leaving the bank.
“While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls through our transformation.”
It was not the first fat finger error for Citi, which has previously faced criticisms of its internal systems. In 2020 it accidentally sent $900m 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 the Citigroup chief executive, Michael Corbat.
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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.
The Financial Times reported that Citi experienced 10 near misses of more than $1bn last year, citing an internal report.
In 2014, a trader cancelled orders for shares in 42 Japanese companies worth 67.78tn yen (£380bn) before they could be made.
