SVB employees received bonuses hours before bank shutdown, reports say
By Ramishah Maruf, CNN
The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation offered Silicon Valley Bank employees 45 days of employment and 1.5 times their salary, reports say.
An FDIC official did not comment on the details to CNN, but said it is standard practice and one of the first steps the independent government agency takes after being named receiver.
US workers also received their annual bonuses on Friday, just hours before FDIC took over the collapsed lender, Axios reported.
SVB collapsed Friday morning after a stunning 48 hours in which a bank run and a capital crisis led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history.
California regulators shuttered the tech lender and put it under the control of the FDIC.
The FDIC is acting as a receiver, which typically means it will liquidate the bank’s assets to pay back its customers, including depositors and creditors.
Employees, except essential and branch workers, were told to keep working remotely, Reuters reported. The bank had more than 8,500 employees at the end of 2022.
The FDIC said the main office and all 17 branches of SVB, located in California and Massachusetts, will reopen Monday.
The FDIC, an independent government agency that insures bank deposits and oversees financial institutions, said all insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits by no later than Monday morning. It said it would pay uninsured depositors an “advance dividend within the next week.”
The FDIC took over in the midmorning Friday; usually it waits until markets close.
“SVB’s condition deteriorated so quickly that it couldn’t last just five more hours,” wrote Better Markets CEO Dennis M. Kelleher. “That’s because its depositors were withdrawing their money so fast that the bank was insolvent, and an intraday closure was unavoidable due to a classic bank run.”
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CNN’s Allison Morrow contributed to this story.
