摘要： Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Mary Ann is on a much deserved break this week, so I am filling in for her, bringing you the hottest fintech news of the previous week. Now let’s dive into the fintech news because you are probably wondering what’s up with your favorite bank, and I promise to get to that first. Let’s go! — Christine
We’ve learned a lot more about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse since the last time you read this newsletter (lots and lots). The latest being that SVB Financial filed for Chapter 11. And First Republic Bank, which was ensnared in all this mess earlier this week, found some saviors in the way of some of the nation’s largest banks that reportedly came together to bolster the bank with around $30 billion in rescue deposits.
This week, some of my colleagues took a deep dive into the effects on consumers, businesses, banks, investors, and so on — all over the world — who had made deposits with SVB. If anything, it shows just how connected the startup ecosystem really is. Annie Njanja and Tage Kene-Okafor got the scoop on African companies affected by the SVB collapse. For example, they spoke to Nala, a mobile money transfer startup, which was able to pull its funds out of SVB before it collapsed. In contrast, Chipper Cash was among several startups that could not access a portion of their funds at the time.
They noted how prolific SVB was in the startup ecosystem when it came to companies opening SVB bank accounts, especially those who were part of a U.S. accelerator program, even explaining how difficult that process was when potential account holders didn’t have a Social Security number or established U.S. address. They also wrote that this type of incident, along with existing high-risk banking options, “have reinforced the need to build homegrown solutions” in Africa.
“If you want U.S.-based banking, which does instill credibility (still) with investors, those are your options,” said Stephen Deng, co-founder and general partner at Africa-focused early-stage VC firm DFS Lab. “I think what changes is that founders must know how they manage counterparty risk. Sweep networks, and treasury management, are all top of mind.”
Meanwhile, Brian Heater reached out to founders and investors in the robotics sector, typically a capital-intensive industry, about what the fallout could mean for them in terms of access to future capital and continuing to diversify sources of funding.
An interesting comment came from Peter Barrett at Playground Global, who said, “If SVB rises from the ashes — and we act to mitigate the weaponization of concentrated digital media — money may not become impossibly expensive for capital intensive technologies like robotics. On the other hand, now that we have motor memory for bank runs, things could get messy. How best would an adversary attack innovation in robotics? We saw how destructive a handful of influential tweets and emails could be in unwinding a valued and respected 40-year-old institution. Why bother with a cyberattack when a few well-placed uppercased words from apparently reputable sources can wound thousands of our most innovative companies?”
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