Santander mistakenly sends Christmas bonus to thousands of Brits leaving lender £130m out of pocket

High street lender Santander has handed out an unexpected Christmas bonus to thousands of Brits.

The Spanish bank mistakenly sent out £130m to around 75,000 business and people on Christmas day.

The news was first reported by The Times.

Businesses and people who receive one-off recurring payments from 2,000 companies with Santander accounts were accidentally paid twice.

The second payment came from Santander’s own reserves, but its own customers were not impacted.

Recouping the money will be tricky as customers are likely to have spent a proportion of it already.

Santander is asking customers to retrieve the lost money on their behalf.

A Santander spokeswoman told The Times: “We’re sorry that due to a technical issue some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts.”

“None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we are taking steps to recover the duplicated transactions in line with industry processes.”

“The duplicated payments were the result of a scheduling issue, which we quickly identified and rectified. The recipients and purpose of payment will have varied among clients but could have included wages or supplier payments.”