This week, my laptop almost got covered in tea.

(English breakfast if you’re curious.)

I’d just read that Citigroup had mistakenly credited a customer account with $81 trillion instead of $280.

That’s not a typo.

Trillion with a T – that’s twelve zeros! $81,000,000,000,000

What amazed me wasn’t just the size of the error but that it passed through two separate employees before a third caught it 90 minutes later.

Citi calls these “near misses” – when they process the wrong amount but recover the funds before disaster strikes.

But in 2021, Citibank, a New York judge ruled that $500m paid in error couldn’t be recovered.

According to the Financial Times, Citibank had 10 near misses of $1 billion or more last year alone.

When dealing with maybe hundreds of thousands of payments a day, errors are bound to happen.

But you wouldn’t expect errors of this size to happen so frequently.

A control is only effective if the person or system doing the check is paying attention.

Errors like Citibank’s grab attention.

But happens all the time – applying minimal scrutiny to our biggest decisions while obsessing over small ones.

It’s like buying a house after one quick walkthrough but testing five different coffee machines before buying one!

A CEO once told me:

“We have three approval levels for expenses over $10,000,” he said proudly.

“But what about the million-dollar strategic decisions?” I asked.

His response?

“They go through faster – they’re made by senior leaders who know what they’re doing.”

Hmmm.

Your Challenge This Week:

Look at your five biggest decisions from the past year and ask:

“How could we improve our decision-making so the biggest decisions get the scrutiny they deserve?”

Because sometimes, the bigger the numbers, the fewer the safeguards.

Matthew Needham is an accountant and former CFO who consults and speaks on improving organisational performance. He helps leaders without a finance background confidently engage in financial discussions, enabling better decisions that drive improved performance. For more information, visit matthewneedham.co.