Flying windfall? Uk uk banks made an extra £130 million in mistakes to customers on Christmas

Many Britons are getting an extra "bonus" for the 2021 Christmas holiday: double their salary for the month. However, this is not because the boss is generous, but because of a technical error in a banking system, which led to an extra £130 million (about 1.12 billion yuan). At present, banks are doing their best to recover lost funds, but it is quite difficult.

According to British media reported on December 30 local time, London Santander Bank unexpectedly sent a duplicate sum of money to 75,000 bank accounts on December 25, about 130 million pounds. The bank, which had originally paid employees at more than 2,000 businesses for a month, mistakenly paid another month.

Santander Bank

The money has been deposited into and disbursed in the accounts of Barclays, HSBC and other partner banks. Santander blamed the timing issue for the duplicate payments, saying the issue "has been quickly identified and corrected."

"We are sorry that some of the payments from our corporate customers have been mistakenly copied into the recipient's account due to technical issues," Santander said in a statement released, "so we will work hard with many banks across the UK to correct duplicate transactions in the coming days." ”

However, how to recover the extra £130 million is a problem. Many britons who received the money may have already spent it or were in poor financial shape, and Santander tried to negotiate with the account holders to get the money back. Returning funds may result in a client overdraft.

Santander Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Spain-based Santander Group, has 616 branches in the UK and employs 20,000 UK employees. The bank has 14 million active clients and manages £209 billion in customer loans and £201 billion in client funds.

While £130 million is a no small mistake, it can't be compared to the $500 million lost in Citibank's "biggest mistake in banking history".

Earlier, Citibank unexpectedly remitted $900 million to a lender of cosmetics company Revlon and took to court in August 2020 in an attempt to recover $500 million that had not been voluntarily repaid. But in February 2021, a judge in the U.S. District Court ruled that the bank was not allowed to recover the money because it was the bank itself that went wrong.

Nandu reporter Shi Minglei