Britain’s Silicon Valley bank will continue to provide services for start-ups from “seed funding to initial public offerings”, the chief executive of Britain’s HSBC said on Tuesday.
“We’re going to protect what we have,” Ian Stewart told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal at the Money20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam.
“We’re going to confine it to our own ringfenced bank, it’s going to have its own board, it’s going to have its own risk policy and we’re going to protect what it has today.”
Britain’s HSBC bought the London-based Silicon Valley Bank subsidiary for £1 ($1.21) in March after its US parent collapsed. Despite having no major client base in Britain, hundreds of founders and venture capitalists said the bank’s collapse would do serious damage to the tech sector, with the government stepping in to broker deals over the weekend.
Some have expressed concern that HSBC, a traditional financial institution, will not be able to keep the UK-based Silicon Valley Bank on the tech-focused start-ups and small businesses it has focused on in the past.
However, Stewart said the bank wanted to reassure customers that this was not the case.
“Our plan is that from seed funding all the way to the IPO, clients will never have to go out of that network to meet their funding needs,” but added HSBC’s products and services, he said.
After migrating back-end systems and processes from the U.S. and restarting under an as-yet-undisclosed name – sources tell sky news It will be HSBC Innovation Bank – Stewart says they want to expand globally.
“We want to go global very, very quickly, building infrastructure in the US, UK, Israel, Middle East and Asia. So it’s a very comprehensive plan,” he said.