The duplicate transactions were charged directly to the bank’s coffers and “at no time did any customer pay out of pocket,” Santander said, needing “to work with numerous banks across the UK to recover” the amounts in question.
Among the beneficiaries of the transfers were employees or suppliers of some of the client companies of Santander -for which they received their salary or payment twice.
The transfers were made to accounts at several other British banks, making it difficult to recover the funds, according to The Times.
The newspaper noted that one of those institutions claims not to want to recover the money if it means that the account holder goes overdrawn.
Santander claims to have “quickly identified and corrected” the planning problem that led to the erroneous payments, adding that it opened a “bank error recovery procedure” with beneficiary banks.
