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One digital payments infrastructure witheverything you needto globalise your payment platform.

One digital payments infrastructure witheverything you needto globalise your payment platform.

Let's meet at Money 20/20 Europe!

Let's meet at Money 20/20 Europe!

Let's meet at Money 20/20 Europe!

I was sitting in a Soho bar on Coronation Day, talking to a tech entrepreneur about Silicon Valley Bank.

As the jazz duet played a little too loudly behind us, he told me how he’d emptied his SVB UK business account in March, when news reached him that the US parent ‘bank for the innovation economy’ was on the point of collapse. How he’d had to explain to – albeit very understanding – investors that the cash was now sitting in his personal account, held with another provider, until they figured out how badly exposed the UK arm of SVB was.

He’s an intelligent chap: he knew that he’d contributed to a run on SVB UK that, ultimately, would see it sold to HSBC in a Bank of England-brokered deal for £1 just a few days later. At which point, he returned the money to the bank.

So, one afternoon in March 2023, SVB

UK was the custodian of around £11billion on behalf of 4,000 or so business customers; by close of play the following day, many of them – spooked, like my drinking pal, by the knowledge that they had more sitting in their account than would be covered by the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme if the bank failed – had withdrawn more than £4billion between them. SVB UK’s fate was sealed.

Under the Bank of England’s ‘resolution’ procedure, introduced after the financial crash in 2008, for a bank the size of SVB UK things would go one of three ways: a sale/transfer to another bank – and fast; a ‘bridge bank’, organised by the Bank of England, would take over the running of SVB UK’s core functions until a deal was done or it was wound down; or (nuclear option) the bank would be declared insolvent immediately, thousands of its bigger business clients would lose a heck