[Money Stuff] Citi Keeps Hitting the Wrong Buttons

Bank error in your favor

I think the best job in tech, or at least my dream job, is designing the user interface for the payments department of Citigroup Inc. As far as I can tell the job is just doing pranks, and the pranks are very funny:

Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues.

The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April and has not been previously reported, was missed by both a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was approved to be processed at the start of business the following day. …

Citi’s $81tn near miss in April was due to an input error and a back-up system with a cumbersome user interface, according to people familiar with the incident. In mid-March, four transactions totalling $280 destined for a customer’s escrow account in Brazil had been blocked by a screen that catches payments that are potential sanction violations.

The payment was quickly cleared, but nonetheless remained stuck in the bank’s system and unable to be completed normally.

Citi’s technology team instructed the payments processing employee to manually input the transactions into a rarely used back-up screen. One quirk of the program was that the amount field came pre-populated with 15 zeros, which the person inputting a transaction needed to delete, something that did not happen.

One quirk? Fifteen zeros? The quirk in the software is that if you type “send $1” it says “okay sending one quadrillion dollars” and you have to backspace over all the zeros?1 Incredible interface design. “What is the lowest amount of money someone might want to send,” the interface designers asked themselves, and then answered “one quadrillion dollars” and fell out of their chairs laughing. “Fifteen zeros,” they screamed through tears of laughter.

They had to work hard to top their previous comedic masterpiece. This is not the first time we have talked about Citi’s payments interface design. In 2020, Citi accidentally wired out $900 million to some angry hedge funds because its payments team checked the wrong boxes in the system. They did this because the boxes were inscrutably labeled. Citi was trying to pretend to send out a payment to a “wash” account, for reasons, and to send a payment to the wash account — instead of to actual recipients — “ALL of the below field[s] must be set to the wash account: FRONT[;] FUND[; and] PRINCIPAL.” The payments person thought “okay I want to send the principal to a wash account” and so checked “PRINCIPAL” but not the other inscrutable ones, and the money actually went out.“A gothic horror story about software design,” I called it.

But this is much better! I mean, worse! (But funnier.) Every day Citi sends out thousands of payments and, almost every time, people remember to delete the FIFTEEN EXTRANEOUS ZEROS and send out a normal payment, and then, you know, at least once, they forget and an $81 trillion payment goes out and Citi is like “whoops we didn’t delete the zeros.” Why are the zeros there in the first place? Just the finest sense of comedy of any department of any bank, incredible.