Allied Irish Bank has admitted that hundreds of its mortgage customers may have unwittingly paid out for insurance cover they did not want.
The news is a big embarrassment to the bank, coming hard on the heels of revelations that for years it has been mistakenly overcharging customers for foreign exchange transactions.
The latest error is understood to have emerged as part of an internal review of systems sparked by the foreign exchange debacle. The banks says approximately 500 of its customers had automatically been charged for payment protection cover when extending their mortgages.
Both incidents are believed to have resulted from incorrect software coding.