Citi’s latest technology improvement isn’t sexy, but it sure is effective: The bank invested in a system that scans 95 million monthly trades to catch human errors – and it’s already preventing what could be costly mistakes.

Citi’s SMART system is dramatically reducing human error in its trading division, CEO Jane Fraser revealed during a talk at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference on Friday.   

The technology aims to provide an antidote to the typing or execution errors that have led to tens of millions in losses for the bank in the past.  

“All of our trades that aren’t completely straight-through processing go into the SMART system to check for any fat-finger errors,” Fraser said. “As 95 million trades a month go through the system, the error rate, unsurprisingly, has fallen by 86%.” 

That anecdote exemplifies Citi’s larger focus on reshaping its digital processes to be more efficient and safer.  

The bank is investing “heavily in operations and in the technology teams,” Fraser said, “Because they’re the ones that are doing the heavy lifting of making sure that we get to single processes, and that we get to single technology architectures where we may have been fragmented before.”