Bank Accidentally Deposits $175M into Customers’ Accounts

Well, Merry F’n Christmas! UK bank Santander was very generous this past Christmas. The bank accidentally paid out a total of £130 million ($175 million) to customers by mistake.

I mean imagine waking up to some extra cash in your account. I would have thought it was a Christmas gift too.

Apparently, the payment was split out over 75,000 different transactions to about 2,000 corporate and commercial customers, Santander stated Thursday.

“We’re sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” reads the statement.

“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 blamed the duplicated payments on a scheduling issue, which was“quickly identified and rectified,” WSVN reported.

The transactions were a mix of regular and one-off payments that could have included supplier payments or wages.

The bank is now working to recover the funds from the recipient banks by using its “bank error recovery process.”  It also has processes set up to seek recovery of funds deposited in error directly from recipients.

This isn’t the first time a bank has had a mix-up either. $175 million is definitely a lot of money to pay out by mistake, but it’s insignificant compared to the time $500 million was paid out by US bank Citibank, one of the “biggest blunders in banking history.”

That bank accidentally deposited out $900 million to the lenders of cosmetic company Revlon. The parties went to court in 2020, for the bank to try and recover some of the $500 million that hadn’t voluntarily been paid back to it.

But in February a US District Court judge denied that request, ruling that the bank won’t be allowed to recover the money.