Santander And Halifax Hit With Christmas Woes

While Christmas time may be a time of good cheer for most people, there was no such comfort for the banking industry on Christmas Eve.

Two of the UK’s most well known banking giants suffered “technical problems” in the lead up to Christmas. The most embarrassing had to be that of Santander, which admitted that it had accidentally sent out the wrong statements to 22,600 customers.

Speaking to eWEEK Europe UK, the Spanish-based owner of what used to be Abbey National blamed a printing error that saw the inclusion of up to two pages of other people’s sensitive financial transactions including their account numbers, names and financial transactions, being dispatched to thousands of wrong addresses.

Thousands Of Customers

“The printing error happened on the statements dated 18 December,” explained a Santander spokesman. “It affects 22,600 customers. With the bank statement, the first page contains the name and address, the account number and sort code. This was correct. However the problem happened on page two and onwards, which included information of other customers, including their names, account numbers and transaction history. It did not contain other people’s addresses or sort codes however.”

So how did the printing error happen?

“As you can imagine when the statements are printed, it requires a large piece of equipment,” said the spokesman. “It was an alignment feed error that saw pages from other customers included.”

Santander said that it deeply regretted the incident and sought to assure customers that the risk posed by fraud would be very small.

“This has never happened before, and obviously it has caused some concern from our customers and worry about fraud,” said the spokesman. “However the risk of fraud associated with this mistake is very, very small as there is little that people can do with that information. Indeed, cheques carry more information.”

“We referred the incident as soon as we knew about it to the financial services authority and they are looking into it,” the spokesman said. “We aware that error had occurred after the event and we had spotted it before customers started to contact us.”

Regulator Action

It is understood that the Information Commissioner’s Office has also launched a probe.

“We do hope that it doesn’t put a dampener on people’s Christmas and we are deeply sorry it happened,” the Santander spokesman said.

Despite this contrition, mistakes of this nature do tend to be punished. Back in August the Information Commissioner’s Office criticised Yorkshire Building Society for allowing an unencrypted laptop to be stolen along with its passwords.

And earlier that month, Zurich Insurance was hit with a record fine of £2.28 million, after its sister company, Zurich South Africa, lost an unencrypted backup tape containing the financial personal information of around 46,000 policy holders.

Halifax Woes

Meanwhile Santander was not the only  financial institution in the UK experiencing difficulties.

Halifax Bank, which is now the mortgage-lending division of Lloyds Banking Group, admitted that it was  unable to process debit and credit card transactions overnight due to a technical problem. This reportedly resulted in an unspecified number of customers being unable to use their debit and credit cards last night and early this morning.

“Due to a technical error overnight, we experienced a slight delay in processing debits and credits for Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers,” Lloyds spokesman Ian Kitts told Bloomberg. “All delayed transactions have been processed and customers shouldn’t experience problems today.”