Thousands of people received a surprise gift over Christmas this year, when European bank Santander mistakenly deposited £ 130 million ($ 176 million) in 75,000 transfers.
The mistake happened when payments from 2,000 UK business accounts were processed twice, meaning employees were paid double, and suppliers were paid more than they expected. According to the bank, the problem was due to a “scheduling problem” that had already been fixed. The bank is now trying to return the funds transferred, many of which went to accounts at rival banks.
“Unfortunately, due to a technical glitch, some of the payments from our company’s customers were duplicated in the recipients’ accounts,” a Santander spokesman told CNBC. “None of our customers were left without money as a result of the mishap, and we will be working hard over the next few days with many UK banks to recover the duplicate transactions.”
One of the payroll managers at the company affected by the crash said: “It ruined my holiday period, I thought I had paid hundreds of thousands by mistake – I thought I had done something wrong. I thought it was just me and I was going to get into trouble at work.” According to the payroll manager, Santander did not share with the business information about the malfunction or how the funds will be refunded.
According to the bank, the process of returning the funds is referred to in the industry as a “banking error recovery process”. Santander announced that they have started working with other banks in accordance with the process, and that these banks will collect the incorrect payments from their customers. According to the announcement, Santander has the ability to collect the funds directly from the recipients’ accounts.