Swiss regulator fines US bank Citi over fat-finger crash
Select your language
Generated with artificial intelligence.
Listening:
Swiss regulator fines US bank Citi over fat-finger crash
Citigroup bank has been fined CHF500,000 ($568,000) by Switzerland’s stock exchange regulator for failures after a London staffer’s fat-finger trade caused a flash crash in European stocks in 2022.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
The total value of the erroneous trades executed on the exchange before the order was canceled was almost CHF108,379,000, the SIX Sanctions Commission said in a statement on Friday. The incident led to the Swiss SMI benchmark index temporarily falling by more than 1.6%.
+ Does Switzerland need a large global bank?
“We are pleased to resolve this matter from more than two years ago, which arose from an individual error that was identified and corrected within minutes,” a Citigroup spokesperson said in a statement. Citigroup said it immediately took steps to strengthen its controls.
Citigroup got off lightly with the Swiss. The bank was fined £61.6 million ($79.6 million) by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority last year for failures linked to the fat-finger trade. The employee had intended to sell a basket of equities valued at $58 million but made an error while inputting the order that resulted in a basket valued at $444 billion being created instead, according to the FCA.
Citigroup’s controls did block a portion of the trade from going through, but not all of it. About $1.4 billion worth of equities were sold across European exchanges before the trader cancelled the order. The bank has also been fined by Germany’s regulator over the incident.
Citi has since been caught up in other fat-finger errors. Last April, the bank almost shifted about $6 billion to a customer’s account by accident after a staffer handling the transfer copied and pasted the account number into a field for the dollar figure. It happened in the same month that another part of the bank accidentally credited $81 trillion to a different client.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
More
Why Switzerland is among the ten fastest-warming countries in the world
More
In Switzerland four out of ten people have a migrant background – who are they?
More
Suicides in Switzerland quadruple among older people
More
French gangs target luxury cars in Switzerland
More
Renewed controversy in Switzerland over US fighter jets – explained
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.