The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Thursday lifted a portion of Citi’s compliance burden related to long-standing issues in its data quality, risk management and internal control functions.
The agency withdrew a 2024 consent order amendment that required the bank to submit a resource review plan, wherein the bank was to lay out the financial, human and technological resources it was dedicating to complying with a 2020 consent order, as well as assess where it was falling short on remediation milestones.
The 2020 enforcement action is still in effect and requires the bank to put forth more effort in addressing operational and risk management issues. The order stemmed in part from an accidental $900 million payment Citi made – manually – to creditors of the cosmetics company Revlon, which the bank blamed on “human error.”
The OCC, at the time, demanded a redesign of Citi’s data architecture and IT infrastructure in a way that “maximize[s] straight-through processing and minimize[s] manual inputting and adjustments,” potentially a direct reference to the Revlon matter.
“Our Transformation has been our number-one priority, and we are dedicating the resources necessary to modernize our systems and strengthen our risk and control environment,” Citi said in a statement Thursday. “Most of our programs are at or nearly at target-state, and we are seeing the benefits of improved, standardized, automated and digitized controls.”
The amendment termination comes one day after Reuters reported that the Federal Reserve closed three notices requiring Citi to fix trading risk management issues.
The OCC originally fined Citi $400 million for its risk-management failures, then followed up in 2024, alongside the Fed, with an additional $135.6 million for not making improvements fast enough.
