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Santander has found itself in a race to recover its funds after the bank accidentally paid £130 million to thousands of individual and business accounts on Christmas day.

Around 75,000 people and companies had money mistakenly deposited into their accounts by the high street bank on December 25th.

The deposits were sent to account holders at Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank and Virgin Money. Payments comprised wages or money from suppliers.

The error happened after one-off and regular payments were made twice in error from about 2,000 business accounts.

However, because the payments were made to rival banks, the bank will have to communicate with the lenders to recover the money.

News of the huge error was first reported by the Times this morning. The paper also indicated that some banks were reluctant to refund the cash as it would push some customer accounts into overdrafts.

Reports have indicated that some customers who received double payments may have already spent the money thus making it harder to recover.

Santander is said to be exploring various options for recovering the cash which shall include contacting the customers directly and working with Pay UK, the main payment systems provider in the UK.

Although it's not yet clear how much, the bank has reportedly already recovered some of the money.

Nonetheless, customers needn't worry as the cash was sent from the bank's own reserves and not from customer accounts.

A spokesman for Santander said: "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 will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days."

Santander bank has over 400 branches across the UK alone.