SANTANDER accidentally payed out £130MILLION to thousands of accounts on Christmas Day in a massive blunder.
Approximately 75,000 Brits or their companies received a second wage or supplier payment from Santander account holders on December 25.
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The blunder – which saw 2,000 accounts lose funds twice – affected both regular wage providers, and one-off supplier payments, The Times reports.
The money was sent to Brits with Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank and Virgin Money accounts.
Santander must now launch cross-company talks to get the funds back – as bosses fear the money has already been spent by some account holders.
Banks are keen to avoid pulling the funds out of accounts directly for fear it would put some customers in their overdrafts.
UK-wide payment systems manager Pay UK is also looking into how to recover the funds.
It is understood that the money came from Santander’s own reserves – rather than their customer’s accounts directly – meaning payment providers are not out of pocket.
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A spokesman for Santander 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.”
