I'm Mary Childs, and today I am joined by Katherine Doherty from Bloomberg News, who reported the bejesus out of this story. And if there's one thing a bank should do, if banks have one existential imperative, it is to keep money - to not accidentally give it away.ĬHILDS: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. ![]() Revlon doesn't have $900 million sitting in cash at Citibank. So the full balance of the loan - repaid by mistake three years early.ĭOHERTY: The six eyes had missed checking two little boxes. Every lender had gotten repaid their share. The entire $900 million had been sent to the lenders. And he's like, the $900 million that we had to fake pay off yesterday - bad news. The guy in Delaware chats his supervisor. There go the payments - all done.ĬHILDS: And then the next morning at 9 am, the contractor in India is looking over the bank's transactions from the day before, as usual, when suddenly he's like, oh, no. He gets a little automated warning on his computer screen that says funds will be sent out of the bank. So the second guy checks it, Delaware guy checks it, and he says, looks good. So just to be clear, he is checking boxes to sort of pretend to send $900 million, but he's actually sending just a few million dollars. And Citibank software is really jenky (ph), so basically the only way to complete the wonky transaction is to sort of momentarily trick the software into thinking that Revlon has repaid the entire loan.ĭOHERTY: So the first set of eyes, the guy in India, carefully checks the special box to fake pay off that whole loan to real send the payment. It's a complicated, multi-step transaction. Three people, six eyes.ĬHILDS: Today's payment is not a normal one. ![]() Then another guy, also in India, checks his work and then our guy in Delaware approves it. First, a contractor in India manually enters the payment information. So every few months, Citibank sends a couple million dollars from Revlon to the lenders, the people that lent Revlon money.ĭOHERTY: Our guy in Delaware is but two eyes in what Citibank calls its six eyes approval process. Revlon borrowed money in 2016 and has to make periodic interest payments on that loan until 2023. Money trundling along from borrower to lender or lender to borrower.ĬHILDS: And on August 11, they're supposed to send out a payment on behalf of Revlon, the makeup company. So that's this guy's job - check the right boxes, approve the payments, off it goes. Like, when a company makes interest payments to its lenders, Citibank helps move that money. So sometimes when lenders have lent money to a company, they'll pay Citibank to just administer the loan - to oversee it. KATHERINE DOHERTY: Because sometimes banks loan money to people or businesses, but other times they basically just babysit other people's loans. On any given day, he and a team oversee millions and millions and millions of dollars moving through the bank's pipes. And it all starts with this one guy in Delaware. Last summer, one of the biggest banks in the universe made one of the biggest mistakes in the universe. SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.
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