The British subsidiary of the Santander bank distributed in error on Christmas day 130 million pounds, or more than 150 million euros, which it intends to recover
These are New Year’s gifts which she would have done well: the British subsidiary of the Santander bank on Christmas day mistakenly distributed 130 million pounds (more than 150 million euros) that it intends to recover.
On December 25, due to a “technical problem”, 75,000 payments made by some 2,000 professional customers of the bank were duplicated in the accounts of their beneficiaries, the bank said on Thursday, confirming information from The Times newspaper. .
Salaries and payments paid twice
The duplicate transactions were directly debited from the bank’s cash registers and “no customer has at any time paid out of pocket”, assured Santander, specifying that he worked “with many banks across the United Kingdom to recover ”the sums concerned. The beneficiaries of the transfers were notably employees or suppliers of certain client companies of Santander – who thus received their wages or their payment twice.
The transfers were made to accounts at several other UK banks, making it difficult to collect the funds, according to The Times. The newspaper said that one of these establishments told him that it was reluctant to recover the money if it meant going overdrawn the account holder.
Santander said he had “quickly identified and corrected” a planning problem at the origin of the erroneous payments, adding to have opened with the beneficiary banks a “bank error recovery procedure”.
The UK branch of Spanish bank Santander has 14 million customers and posted a net profit of over £ 1 billion for the first nine months of 2021.