Santander Bank accidentally Pays Out £130 million on Christmas Day

Santander Bank has accidentally paid £130 million to 75,000 accounts belonging to individuals and businesses on Christmas day.

The bank attributed the blunder to payments duplication. The Guardian reported that about 75,000 people and companies who received one-off or regular payments from 2,000 businesses with accounts at the bank were inadvertently paid a second time on 25 December.

Santander said that the payments were duplicated because of a scheduling issue, which was “quickly identified and rectified.”

“The transactions comprised a range of regular and one-off payments. The recipients and purpose of payment will have varied among clients but could have included wages or supplier payments,” the bank said in a statement.

The bank is also working hard to retrieve the money. An executive at a rival bank told The Telegraph: “If we don’t return the money to Santander, it might be our next month if something goes wrong…It’s likely the funds will be returned next week.”

The Times reported that account holders at Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank, and Virgin Money were among those affected.

There is still hope that the cash can be retrieved but there are also concerns that it may have been spent already. The rival banks do not want to push their customers into overdrafts. One bank said it would be reluctant to take the money back if it meant the account holder was tipped into overdraft as a result.

Pay UK, which runs the main payment systems in the UK, is holding talks on how to reverse the payments and some cash has already been recovered.

A spokesperson said: “We’re sorry that due to a technical issue some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts.

“None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.”