It has been reported that Santander paid out £130million to thousands of people and companies in a massive banking error on Christmas Day.
According to The Times, almost 75,000 individuals and businesses were accidentally paid a second time from nearly 2,000 Santander accounts on December 25.
The huge blunder has affected both one-off and regular payments made from Santander accounts.
The publication has also claimed that the high street lender's efforts to recover the payments won't be easy as the money has gone to "accounts of customers with dozens of other banks" including Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank and Virgin Money.
That's not all; Santander may face another issue as some of the banks whose account holders received the money in error worry that their customers may have already "spent the cash or been misled into thinking they were in better financial shape than they thought."
Reportedly, Santander is approaching both the other party's banks and even going directly to recipients to retrieve the cash in a process known as a "banking error recovery".
Pay UK, which runs the main payment systems in the UK, is also holding talks on how to reverse the payments.
It is reported that the money sent in error would have come from the lender's own reserves and not from customer accounts, meaning no Santander customers should've found themselves out of pocket due to the payment glitch.
A spokesman for Santander told the publication: "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."
Santander has over 400 physical banks branches in the UK and 14 million active customers.
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