By Lananh Nguyen and Pete Schroeder
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Employees of Silicon Valley Bank were offered 45 days of employment at one and a half times their salary by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, the U.S. regulator that took control of the collapsed lender on Friday, according to an email to staff seen by Reuters.Â
Workers will be enrolled and given information about benefits over the weekend by the FDIC, and healthcare details will be provided by the former parent company SVB Financial Group, the FDIC wrote in an email entitled “Employee Retention” late on Friday. SVB had a workforce of 8,528 at the end of last year.
Staff were told to continue working remotely, except for essential workers and branch employees.
The FDIC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Silicon Valley Bank imploded after depositors, concerned about the lender’s financial health, rushed to withdraw their deposits. The frenetic two-day run on the bank blindsided observers and stunned markets, wiping out more than $100 billion in market value for U.S. banks.
SVB ranked as the 16th biggest bank in the United States at the end of last year, with about $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in deposits.
“Everyone is working with FDIC to stabilize the situation as quickly as possible,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
The lender’s main office in Santa Clara, California and its 17 branches in California and Massachusetts will reopen on Monday, the FDIC said in a statement on Friday.
SVB Securities, a broker-dealer owned by the bank’s former parent group, said on Saturday that its business would not be directly impacted by Silicon Valley Bank’s failure.
Some businesses with holdings at the failed bank are already receiving offers from hedge funds to buy their stranded deposits for as little as 60 cents on the dollar, Semafor, a news website, reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.
(Reporting by Lananh Nguyen in New York and by Pete Schroeder and Jason Lange in Washington; Editing by Megan Davies, Franklin Paul and Paul Simao)
