The British subsidiary of the Santander bank distributed 130 million pounds (more than 150 million euros) by mistake on Christmas Day. This is a sum that it intends to recover.
On December 25, due to a "technical problem", 75,000 payments made by some 2,000 business customers of the bank were duplicated on the accounts of their beneficiaries, said the bank in a statement, confirming a report in The Times newspaper.
The transfers were made to accounts in several other British banks, which complicates the recovery of the funds, according to The Times.
The newspaper says one of those banks told it it was reluctant to recover the money if it meant overdrawing the account holder.
Santander said it had "quickly identified and corrected" a planning problem that caused the erroneous payments, adding that it had opened a "bank error recovery procedure" with the beneficiary banks.
The UK subsidiary of Spanish bank Santander has 14 million customers and has made a net profit of more than 1 billion pounds in the first nine months of 2021.
Source : 20minutes.fr