10 Charts on the Banking Meltdown of 2023 & the State of Financial Technology Today

Yesterday marked one year since SVB collapsed

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed a year ago following the largest bank run in history, it looked like a systemic crisis might be at hand.

Signature Bank closed just two days after SVB. A week later UBS took over Credit Suisse, and the next month First Republic was absorbed by JP Morgan Chase—both cases of large, teetering institutions being rescued in a nick of time.

But the federal government’s commitment to backstop all SVB deposits stemmed the panic, and the big banks are now doing fine, though some of the underlying reasons for the SVB failure still haunt the sector. 

1. A Timeline of the Banking Crisis

SVB’s downfall followed several years of spectacular growth: its domestic assets increased more than four-fold during the five year period from June 2017 to June 2022 as startup funding boomed, while the assets of the top 100 commercial US banks grew just 42%. SVB was the 13th largest bank in the US by March 2022, but it put far too much of its deposit base into long-term government bonds and was abruptly rendered insolvent by a sharp spike in interest rates and a run on deposits.

2. HSBC Picks Up SVB Bankers

After the collapse of SVB, senior bankers raced to find new gigs. Fresh after the unraveling, PitchBook analyzed LinkedIn profiles and found that HSBC was the primary destination for former SVB employees right after the collapse. PitchBook determined that HSBC had hired 28 people who had been at or above the director level at SVB. A total of 78 former SVB senior bankers had made moves, as of two months after the collapse.

3. Where Some SVB Accounts Headed