Today's column on Bloomberg by Matt Leving talks about an $81 trillion erroreous transfer that happened Citibank last month. That's not a typo. Levine's column has a lengthy excerpt from a Financial Times article that explains what happened: 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. There are people working at financial institutions who have no fucking idea what they are doing. Here's a gift link to the Bloomberg column. A Bloomberg subscription is not required. The link expires in seven days. https://tinyurl.com/250303BBLevine
just space filler writing. swift transfer doesn’t process 15 digit payments, 11 digit max. whatever this is, its citi own in house account.
Okay, maybe. But again, Levine is just quoting from the FT article. And I think it's very interesting that this kind of extreme error started with a $280 payment that was flagged as a potential "sanction violation." And that the payment was "quickly cleared, but nonetheless remained stuck in the bank’s system and unable to be completed normally." That's more or less what the original post in this thread was about. Payments get "stuck," and sometimes the customer cannot talk to anyone who knows why, and then sometimes you get to talk to someone who can see that the payment has been "cleared," bit it's still "stuck," and the customer can't talk to anyone who knows how to resolve the problem. And many bank employees are trained that they cannot tell a customer why a payment is "stuck," or delayed, or blocked, or whatever, even if they know why. Once something gets "flagged" as potential fraud, or potential sanctions violation, no one at the bank is going to tell you that unless you can get to someone on their legal team.
I've done numerous wires with WF never a problem. There's 3 branches within a few miles of me. I would never bank without a physical office nearby.