UPDATED: Nationwide blames duplicate payments glitch on human error

Nationwide Building Society has become the latest member of the financial services community to suffer technical difficulties after some of its customers had debit payments taken twice.

In a statement, the firm said the issue had affected current account card transactions made on Tuesday 24 July. These payments were then duplicated the following day.

"This is a one off isolated incident and is down to human error," it stated.

The building society said it plans to repay the duplicated transactions overnight, and refund customers who may have incurred further charges as a result of the mishap.

"We would like to apologise for the inconvenience this has caused," the firm added.

In a further statement released this afternoon, the company confirmed that 704,426 accounts had been affected by the glitch.

Jenny Groves, divisional director for customer experience at Nationwide, added: "The error will be corrected tonight."

Meanwhile, Royal Bank of Scotland-owned bank Natwest has also reported this afternoon that some of its customers have encountered difficulties using their debit cards and online banking services.

The bank used social networking site, Twitter, to assure customers it was working to resolve the issue.

A tweet from the @Natwest_Help account stated: "Some customers may have issues with their Online Banking and using their debit cards at the moment. Working as hard as we can to resolve.

"We'll post updates as soon as we have more information."

The latest glitch comes hot on the heels of last month's IT system failure at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which blighted millions of the banking group's customers.