A sign hangs from a branch of a bank in London.
Thousands of people received a surprise gift on Christmas Day this year when European bank Santander accidentally deposited over a hundred million dollars.
Some employees saw their wages double, while suppliers got more than they were expecting, because payments from 2,000 business accounts in the U.K. were processed twice.
Ascheduling issue caused the duplicate payments, the bank said.
Many of the mistaken payments have gone into rival banks' accounts.
A spokesman for the company told CNBC that some payments from corporate clients were duplicated on recipients' accounts.
We will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days, and none of our clients were left out of pocket as a result.
Reports suggest that the incident may have affected the spirits of payroll staff.
One payroll manager told the BBC that it ruined his holiday period because he thought he had done something wrong. I was going to get in trouble at work and I thought it was me.
According to the report, the payroll manager said that the second payment was not shared with staff or given any information about how it should be repaid.
The process for recovering funds is called the bank error recovery process. It said that it has begun to work with other banks to recover accidental payments from their customers accounts.
It said it can recover funds from people's accounts.
