The Financial Conduct Authority has fined Santander £32.8m for failing to effectively deal with the accounts and investments of deceased customers over several years.

Santander did not transfer funds totalling over £183m to beneficiaries when it should have done.

Some 40,428 customers were hit by the problems.

The FCA said that Santander’s conduct, “fell below the standards of openness and cooperation expected of an authorised firm.”

Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: “These failings took too long to be identified and then far too long to be fixed.

“To the firm’s credit, once these problems were notified to the board and senior management, they were fixed properly and promptly.

“But recognition of the problem took too long. Firms must be able to identify and respond to problems more quickly especially when they are causing harm to customers.”

Santander breached Principle 3 and Principle 6 between 1 January 2013 and 11 July 2016 by failing to take reasonable care to “organise and control” its probate and bereavement process responsibly and effectively and by failing to treat its customers, and those who represented them on their death, fairly.

Santander’s probate and bereavement process contained weaknesses which included:

• Reduced ability to identify all the funds it held which formed part of a deceased customer’s estate;
• Failing to effectively follow-up on communications with deceased customer representatives
• •  Ineffective monitoring of open probate and bereavement cases.

The FCA says these weaknesses meant the probate and bereavement process would start but often stall with funds not transferred to those who entitled to them.

In some cases, funds were held for many years contributing to beneficiaries being deprived for a considerable amount of time.

Since 2015, Santander has carried out remediation exercises to transfer funds from affected accounts to beneficiaries.

In some cases, Santander has paid interest on the funds to beneficiaries together with compensation for any loss.