Last December, Oleg Rogynskyy, a West Coast-based entrepreneur who runs an artificial intelligence start-up, made a bold decision: he closed his corporate account with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) after years of custom.
The reason? Rogynskyy’s father worked at a Ukrainian bank that, in 1998, suffered a run. At a young age, he learnt to be hypervigilant. So, as he watched the fallout from the collapsing crypto exchange FTX, Rogynskyy peered closer and noticed that SVB’s bankers seemed oddly jittery in their dealings with him. “They were really focused on not having cash leave the bank,” he recalls. He shut the account three months before SVB imploded. “Having seen what happened to my father’s bank, I had a feeling that a bank which is behaving oddly has something going on,” he says.
In recent days there have been plenty of tales about how blind most of SVB’s clients and investors were to the looming risks, even as its market capitalisation plummeted and short sellers, including Jim Chanos, weighed in.