Santander sent £130m in accidental payments on Christmas Day

Blunder paid cash to 2,000 people and companies in 75,000 separate transactions

Santander is scrambling to claw back the unexpected Christmas Day bonus for thousands of people and businesses. Bloomberg

High street bank Santander is racing to recover £130 million ($175.2 million) it accidentally paid out to about 2,000 people and businesses in a Christmas Day blunder.

About 75,000 one-off or regular payments from the lender were mistakenly paid a second time to the customers on the morning of December 25, with the cash sums including wages or money from suppliers.

However, recovering the money may be a complicated process for Santander, because some of the payments were sent to rival banks such as HSBC, Barclays, NatWest and Virgin Money.

It means the bank may have to rely on the kindness of others to secure the return of the cash, with the money coming from the lender’s reserves in the meantime.

Santander said it was sorry about the incident, which it blamed on a scheduling issue that it quickly rectified.

“Some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients' accounts,” a spokesperson said.

"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."

Pay UK, which runs the main payment systems in the UK, is holding talks on how to reverse the payments and some cash has already been recovered.

Under the "bank error recovery" process, Santander is talking to rivals and approaching some customers directly.

However, while banks can recover the cash, some lenders may be reluctant to reclaim the money because the account holders may have already spent it and taking it back may tip them into overdraft.

In November, Santander faced another hurdle when some of its customers could not access their online bank accounts or make card payments.