Friday, March 10

8:45 am

I didn’t sleep all Thursday nights. I started corresponding with investors and they told me that people actually went to SVB branches to get cashier’s checks. I thought, “Wow, everyone got out except me because I was doing my due diligence.” I’m usually the fastest to act in a situation, but one of my decisions was to take more time to digest the situation before reacting. It took me two hours to digest, and it was already late. I missed the bank run.

I woke up on a Friday, got dressed, and at 8:45 I got to the SVB office in Palo Alto. It was supposed to open at 9 am or 9:30. I drove to the branch where I knew the other founder had received the cashier’s check. There were already notices posted on the bank’s door by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that it was closed.

There were a few more people there very early, it was raining and we all went back to our cars looking sad. Other people also looked very boring, and I thought: “Yeah, these are the founders.” The four of us who were there weren’t talking because I wasn’t on talk mode.

9:30 am

I looked at the payroll. A transfer from an SVB account to a payroll provider of about $200,000 was due on Monday. I called Gusto, our payroll provider, and asked, “Will this transfer work on Monday?” They’re like, “Yeah, this will work, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Later on Friday, they sent a notice that read: “Actually, this won’t work, if your account was connected to SVB, you’d better send us the money we need to pay wages.” It was then that I began to realize that I needed to find that money.

I scheduled a call with our employment lawyer for Saturday because I wanted to understand – can we skip payroll? I knew it would hurt my employees, but what would you actually do if you missed a paycheck? It turns out that you can’t skip a salary, especially in the state California.

10:30

I called Zoom with my co-founder and our operations led to a discussion of the full situation and all the things that are going wrong. Our credit card was with SVB and I knew those payments would start to fail. I thought, “We’re going to have to move credit cards for all these services.” I took an average—Amazon web services, software like Slack and Notion, Google—and figured it would probably be no more than $10,000 on a given day for fees charged.

At the heart of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse were uninsured savers — specifically start-ups that have much more than the $250,000 insured limit and can’t get paid without access to their accounts. This is tempting given SVB’s inability to suggest that the insured deposit limit needs to be raised, but this decision creates new problems. The best approach for the US would be to follow the example of other countries and create “payment banks” that are virtually risk-free, highly regulated, and have access to the payment network. They will be a place where companies can place funds – such as venture capital investments meant to pay wages – without exposing themselves to the risks that conventional banks create.

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank highlighted the underestimated weaknesses of the US banking system. While banking crises have historically been linked to credit risk, the recent crisis of confidence has arisen from unrealized losses on safe-haven securities that have left savers anxiously seeking liquidity. The liquidation of these securities resulted in losses in current market prices and heightened the fears of these depositors, leading to a bank run.

While insured savers have little to worry about, the recent crisis has highlighted the critical role of large uninsured savers who are understandably prone to worry. They make up more $8 trillion — or about 40% of all US deposits.

And one concern in particular stands out: the prospect of many companies inability to pay wages was a critical aspect of this crisis, as it became clear that some uninsured depositors were business customers who could not pay their employees without access to their accounts.

The problem of uninsured deposits

As an emergency response, the FDIC needed to effectively remove the deposit insurance limit and declare troubled banks systemically important to restoring calm. This solution is problematic for many reasons. In the absence of many new rules, unlimited deposit insurance gives banks a terrible incentive. And the rules needed to dampen those dire stimuli could stifle risk in the economy as a whole.

A deeper solution to this problem lies in understanding the dilemma of uninsured savers and addressing their needs more directly. It is easy to portray the uninsured saver as a reckless risk seeker. who flutters between banks in search of profitability. This caricature does not deserve saving or much sympathy. But the reality is that many uninsured savers face a huge dilemma.

Consider the problem of wages in the private sector, which is more than $9 trillion in annual cash flows in the US only. Large sums of money must be deposited on a regular basis, and this money must be placed in a bank in order to access the payment system. These deposits simply have no alternative other than banks, and are therefore susceptible to banks lending or buying assets. with these large deposits. In this process, all of our paychecks are dependent on the decisions of the bankers, who can take these large, unstable deposits, risk them, and then socialize the losses when we are forced to withdraw deposit insurance.

The case of “payment banks”

The problem of uninsured savers is really a problem of access to the payment system – a system monopolized by central banks and then delegated to banks. The problem of wages is a prime example of this problem, since wage funds must necessarily be kept in banks, where they are exposed to the risks mentioned above.

happy, other countries began to look for ways to solve this problem. V Great Britain, AustraliaAnd Singapore everyone has been innovating and we can learn a useful lesson from their efforts. Basically, there are two possible solutions: allow non-banks access to the payment system, as the UK and other countries have allowed, or create banks that do nothing more than solve this “wage problem”. We prefer the latter.

To solve the problem of uninsured creditors without distorting incentives to take risks, the US should create a special class of banks called a “payment bank” that does nothing but process payments. Their deposit base will be large and potentially volatile, they will be highly regulated (even more so than money market funds), and they will not be able to take on credit or repayment risk. In short, they will accept payroll deposits and other such large B2B transactions and facilitate access to the payment system.

What will be the business model for these payment banks? There are two possibilities: they can make a safe profit by investing these deposits in the Federal Reserve at the federal funds rate, or they can charge their clients a very small fee for facilitating these large payments. Investing large amounts of these deposits for very short periods without risk can generate significant returns, especially in the current environment, and it is possible that some of this income may even be returned to depositors.

While we have characterized this as a wage problem, there are many other economic agents with large, unstable deposits who are just looking to get into the payment system. Consider a $100 million business that has $70 million in annual costs and prudently keeps cash equivalent to monthly expenses in the bank to cover payments. Alternatively, consider starting a venture capital or private equity fund that seeks to raise capital or use capital to acquire companies.

Currently, these funds must be accessed by traditional banks in order to access payment features. Indeed, this is precisely the business model for both Silicon Valley Bank and Bank of the First Republic. But every bank has such clients. Indeed, the broader scope of card payments is Where 9 trillion dollars in card payments must be routed to merchant bank accounts through merchant acquirers – has similar features.

By creating payment banks, large unstable deposits that far exceed any reasonable deposit insurance limit will find a suitable place in a highly regulated bank that carries virtually no credit or repayment risk and can facilitate their transactions. More importantly, the entire banking system will no longer bear the burden of these uninsured deposits and will be able to return to its core function of retail deposits and making sound lending and asset management decisions. And we can avoid lifting the limit on deposit insurance and turning all banks into systemic ones. In some ways, this solution is less ambitious and far more realistic than using stablecoins or central bank digital currency to facilitate B2B payments on alternative payment rails. In many ways, this idea reflects the principles of industrial power. clearing and settlement applied in financial markets to a wider range of payments.

The reality is that the US banking system has become much less dynamic since the global financial crisis. Almost no entrance. while number of US banks may be high compared to many other countries, the truth is that we do not need more traditional banks – we need different types of banks. Crises are terrible things to wasteand it could lead us to a much safer banking system by recognizing the problem of uninsured depositors and creating a home for them.