SVB UK New Owner: We’re Still in the Startup Business

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) UK’s new owner says the lender hasn’t lost its pro-startup philosophy.

The bank, now owned by British banking giant HSBC, will continue to work with startup companies “from seed funding to IPO,” CEO Ian Stuart said in an interview with CNBC at the Money20/20 conference in Amsterdam.

“We’re going to protect what we’ve got,” said Stuart. “We are going to keep it ringfenced within our own ringfenced bank, it will have its own board, it will have its own risk policies, we are going to protect what it’s got today.”

HSBC acquired SVB UK for one pound in March after the failure of SVB’s parent company, which triggered a global banking crisis.

“This acquisition makes excellent strategic sense for our business in the U.K.,” HSBC Group CEO Noel Quinn said in a news release. “It strengthens our commercial banking franchise and enhances our ability to serve innovative and fast-growing firms, including in the technology and life-science sectors, in the U.K. and internationally.”

Quinn and Stuart had also reassured investors they had no plans to alter how SVB UK was run. Many observers worried that the two banks weren’t a good fit: HSBC is a more traditional financial institution, while SVB had more of a tech focus.

For example, James Hickson, founder and CEO at European revenue-based lender Bloom, told PYMNTS in March that HSBC was “a good safe haven for depositors,” but also said the purchase presented a conundrum.

“A challenge they’ve got is to ensure that the culture does not get destroyed in the process and that all the factors that made SVB successful, including its ties to the VC [venture capital] community, are not lost,” he told PYMNTS.

Last month, Quinn said his bank’s purchase of SVB UK will help set the stage for a worldwide tech operation.

“I want to take that capability globally,” the CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I’m also setting up teams in other parts of the world that are the equivalents of SVB in the U.K. So we bought a business in the U.K., but I want to create that capability globally.”

The bank is also reportedly set to rebrand as “HSBC Innovation Banking” sometime this month.

“We want to be global very, very quickly, setting up infrastructure in the U.S., U.K., Israel, Middle East and Asia,” Stuart said Tuesday. “So it’s a really comprehensive plan.”