A British bank mistakenly pays millions on Christmas Day

(CNN) – the bank Santander from United Kingdom He got into the holiday spirit this year by mistakenly paying a total of 130 million pounds ($175 million) to his clients on December 25.

The total payments were broken down into 75,000 transactions for about 2,000 corporate and commercial customers, Santander said in a statement published Thursday.

“We regret that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate customers were incorrectly replicated in recipient accounts,” the statement read.

“None of our customers have run out of funds in their accounts as a result, and we will be working hard with several banks across the UK to get duplicate transactions back in the coming days.”

Santander blamed the duplicate payments on a scheduling problem, which the bank said was “identified and quickly corrected”.

He added that the transactions were regular payments and one-off payments that could include payments to vendors or salaries.

Santander is working to recover funds from receiving banks through a “bank error recovery process,” according to the statement, and has processes in place for requesting refunds of erroneously deposited funds directly from recipients.

Santander UK is a wholly owned subsidiary of the global bank Banco Santander, headquartered in Spain.

The British company has 14 million active customers and 616 branches, according to its website.

And while $175 million is a lot to be paid in error, it pales in comparison to the $500 million that Citibank lost in one of the “biggest blunders in banking history.”

The bank accidentally sent $900 million to the lenders of cosmetics company Revlon and went to court in August 2020 to try to recover about $500 million that had not been voluntarily repaid.

But in February, a judge in the US District Court. Rule The bank will not be able to get the money back.