Christmas blunder: UK bank mistakenly transfers $175 mn to customers, now wants it back

After getting into the gifting spirit of Christmas on December 25 by mistakenly transferring a total of £130 million ($175 million) to its customers, UK’s bank Santander is trying to recover the amount. 

The customers of the bank were in for a big surprise when the credit occurred.  

In a statement published on Thursday, Santander said that the total amount was split over 75,000 transactions for around 2,000 corporate and commercial customers.  

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"We're sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients' accounts," reads the statement.  

"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."  

The duplicated payments have been blamed on a scheduling issue by the bank. The issue has been "quickly identified and rectified," said the bank.  

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These transactions included both regular and one-off payments, which could have included supplier payments or wages, the statement added.  

The bank is currently working to recover the funds from recipient banks with the help of "bank error recovery process," said the statement. It also has processes in place to seek funds’ recovery, which have been deposited due to error, directly from the recipients.  

(With inputs from agencies)