On December 25, due to a "technical problem", 75,000 payments made by some 2,000 professional customers of the bank were duplicated in the accounts of their beneficiaries, the bank said Thursday in a statement sent to AFP, confirming information from The Times newspaper.

Duplicate transactions were directly debited from the bank's cash registers and "no customer has paid out of pocket at any time," Santander assured, specifying that he works "with many banks across the UK to recover "the sums concerned.

The beneficiaries of the transfers were notably employees or suppliers of certain client companies of Santander - who thus received their wages or their payment twice.

The transfers were made to accounts at several other UK banks, making it difficult to collect the funds, according to The Times.

The newspaper said that one of these establishments told him that it was reluctant to recover the money if it meant going overdrawn the account holder.

Santander said he had "quickly identified and corrected" a planning problem at the origin of the erroneous payments, adding that he had opened a "bank error recovery procedure" with the beneficiary banks.

The UK branch of Santander bank has 14 million customers and reported a net profit of over £ 1 billion for the first nine months of 2021.

© 2021 AFP