Thankfully for clients of Silicon Valley Bank, there’s light at the end of the tunnel: Their money will be backstopped by the government.
But for the SVB staff who managed those accounts, there’s no silver lining in sight.
The failure of SVB—a key lender to startups—and NYC-based Signature Bank earlier this month prompted an intervention from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect depositors’ funds, but questions remain around the strength of the American banking sector.
With a new CEO and owner at the helm, the ship has been somewhat steadied for SVB employees—but many of the troubled lender’s staff still reportedly stand to incur substantial financial losses as a result of the company’s downfall.
Speaking to Insider, an SVB employee explained that some members of staff receive up to 50% of their annual salaries in the form of company stock. This particular individual said their stock had been worth more than $1 million prior to SVB’s collapse. Now it’s worth nothing.
Trading of SVB shares was halted earlier this month.
The SVB employee told Insider that staff began to realize the true extent of their loss when the adrenaline wore off and workers returned to the SVB offices a couple of weeks after the bank’s collapse. Hoping for camaraderie, the individual said, the office was instead full of tearful peers.
“First Republic got a capital injection, Signature sold, Credit Suisse sold,” they said. “And here we are, the people who started it. We still don’t have someone. We’re still in this state of uncertainty.”
The employee, who spoke to Insider anonymously, added that “a lot of personal apprehension and stress” was lingering for many coworkers.
“People are just now starting to think of themselves and their futures,” they said. “The adrenaline rush has worn off now, and the reality is starting to sink in.”
SVB benefits documents seen by Fortune show that the company’s employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) allowed staffers to contribute up to 10% of their earnings to purchase company stock at a discount.
The shares were purchasable by employees at a discounted rate of 85% of their fair market value, either on the first or the last day of a six-month offering period.
It is unclear whether the company had additional stock-based compensation policies, like restricted stock units, in place.
The anonymous employee said that when SVB’s bank run initially began, any selfish behavior was put out of mind—it simply “didn’t exist.” Although individual workers were worried about the security of their homes and their children’s education, they added, the focus remained on whether their clients could make payroll.
The source added: “On an internal call, someone said that if we can stop the bleeding and the deposit outflow, that will be the greatest story ever told. It will be the people who worked here that saved it.”
SVB did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Staff weren’t the only ones to lose out from SVB’s collapse: Sweden’s largest pension fund, Alecta, is facing over $1 billion in losses.
“We think that it’s a big failure for us as an investor,” CEO Magnus Billing told Bloomberg earlier this month. “And we need to learn something from that and take actions based upon the lessons learned.”
Meanwhile, high-profile investor Mark Cuban was also exposed to major losses in the collapse, while actress Sharon Stone revealed last week she had lost “half her money” in the chaos.
‘Remember to eat’
As well as taking a financial toll on SVB staff, the turbulence of the last month was also said to have had an impact of many employees’ physical wellbeing.
Tensions were so high at SVB in the days after its collapse that managers had to remind their teams to keep eating, the employee told Insider.
However, they added many workers felt they were left out in the cold. They found out about the FDIC intervention from the news, with a company memo surfacing a couple of minutes later, they claimed.
The employee added that although they were on the “front line” dealing with clients, there was nothing they could say, as they simply didn’t know what was going to happen.
The Insider interview was the latest employee to hit out at SVB’s handling of its collapse.
Speaking to CNN, a staffer called SVB’s former CEO Greg Becker‘s decision to go on record about losses “idiotic.”
“They were being very transparent,” they said. “It’s the exact opposite of what you’d normally see in a scandal. But their transparency and forthrightness did them in.”
