Citigroup mistakenly credited a customer account with $81 trillion

Citigroup erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer’s account and took hours to reverse the transaction, a “near miss” that shows up the bank’s operational issues it has sought to fix, the Financial Times first reported on Friday.

The error, which occurred last April, was missed by a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be processed the next day, FT said, citing an internal account and two people familiar with the event.

A third employee caught the error one-and-a-half hours after the payment was processed and the transaction was ultimately reversed several hours later, FT said.