LONDON — Hundreds of oldsters obtained a shock reward on Christmas Day this year when European monetary institution Santander unintentionally deposited £130 million ($176 million) all the procedure by 75,000 transactions.

The mistake took predicament when payments from 2,000 industrial accounts in the U.Okay. had been processed twice, that suggests some employees noticed their wages double, whereas suppliers also got more than they had been searching forward to.

The monetary institution acknowledged the reproduction payments had been precipitated by a “scheduling train” that has now been rectified.

It’s now attempting to enhance the unsuitable payments, heaps of which obtain long gone into monetary institution accounts operated by rival banks.

“We’re sorry that attributable to a technical train, some payments from our corporate customers had been incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” a Santander spokesperson told CNBC. 

“None of our customers had been at any level brushed off of pocket due to this and we can be working gripping with many banks all the procedure by the UK to enhance the duplicated transactions over the upcoming days.”

Reports counsel the incident may presumably obtain dampened the spirits of some payroll personnel on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

“It ruined my vacation duration due to I believed I would paid out a entire bunch of thousands in error — I believed I had done one thing infamous,” one payroll supervisor reportedly told the BBC. “I believed it used to be precise me and that I was going to gain in pain at work.”

The payroll supervisor added that Santander hasn’t shared how agencies have to peaceable gift the 2d charge to personnel or supplied any recordsdata about how it’ll peaceable be repaid, in step with the account.

Santander acknowledged the assignment for bettering the funds is an replace assignment identified as the “monetary institution error restoration assignment.” It added that it has began to work with other banks in accordance with the assignment and that these banks will seek to enhance the unintended payments from their customer’s accounts.

It acknowledged it also has the capability to enhance the funds right now from other folks’s accounts.