By PYMNTS | October 12, 2026
Citi aims to submit an internal audit to banking regulators by the first quarter of 2027, if not earlier, in hopes that the regulators will lift the consent orders the bank has been operating under since 2020, Reuters reported Monday (Oct. 12), citing unnamed sources.
Citi is working to deliver an audit that is comprehensive enough that it will not encounter delays in being approved by the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), so the bank can shift its focus from remediation to growth, according to the report.
Citi has never stated a timeline for this effort, and a Citi spokesperson said in the report that the timing is in the hands of regulators.
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
“As we have said consistently, we will not speculate about the lifting of the consent orders because that remains solely at our regulators’ discretion,” the spokesperson told Reuters.
The consent orders imposed by the Fed and the OCC in 2020 demand that Citi improve technology and procedures in order to better detect mistakes such as problematic transactions and risky trades. When imposing the consent orders, the regulators cited a case in which Citi accidentally sent $900 million to a company’s creditors.
In July 2024, the Fed and the OCC fined Citi $136 million, saying the bank had failed to make sufficient progress in addressing data management issues identified in 2020. The OCC also mandated that Citi implement a new quarterly process to ensure the bank is allocating sufficient resources to meet its milestones.
The OCC terminated that July 2024 amendment to the October 2020 consent order in December 2025, saying that the bank’s safety and soundness and its compliance with laws and regulations no longer required the existence of the amendment.
When it was reported in March that Citi was considering acquiring a major U.S. regional bank or brokerage, Citi said that the report was “baseless speculation” and that the bank was focused on executing its strategy and completing its transformation.
According to Monday’s Reuters report, a lifting of the consent orders by the Fed and the OCC would boost Citi’s stock and free up resources. Citi spent $3.3 billion on its “transformation” in 2025 alone, the report said.
Citi’s wealth division, which has the lowest return among the bank’s five businesses, and its retail business could benefit from the increased scale that would come with a potential addition of branches or acquisition of a wealth manager. Both moves would be easier once the consent orders are lifted, per the report.