UK bank Abbey is working to reverse a processing error that led to thousands of customers being mistakenly billed twice for the same Visa debit card transactions.
The system glitch occurred over the long Bank Holiday weekend when a batch of Visa debit transactions were mistakenly processed twice during an overnight processing run on 29 August.
The bank is currently working to reverse all duplicate payments and backdate customer accounts, including ATM payments, affected by the foul-up.
A bank spokesperson was unable to reveal the nunmbers of customers affected by the error.
It's the latest in a series of embarrassing computer mishaps to have hit the UK banking group in recent months. In June, Abbey was forced to apologise for a systems problem with its online business banking service that caused some customers' payments to be sent to the wrong people. This followed an incident the previous month in which the bank's system failed to renew certain overdraft limits at the beginning of May and as a result some customers were wrongly hit with unauthorised overdraft fees and other charges.
Abbey is currently mid-way through the phased roll-out of a new banking platform from Spanish parent Banco Santander.
A bank spokesperson says she has "no information" to indicate that the recent computer muddles are a consequences of the Santander Partenon roll-out. She says the exact cause of the Visa debit glitch has "yet to be determined".