Sarah Wenger is Senior Analyst, Maria Vu is Senior Director, and Dimitri Zagoroff is Senior Editor at Glass, Lewis & Co. This post is based on their Glass Lewis memorandum.
In the spring of 2023, the United States witnessed the country’s three largest bank failures since the 2008 financial crisis. Market-wide developments such as high interest rates and regulation rollbacks, along with company-specific factors including overly concentrated clientele and reliance on uninsured deposits, affected leadership’s ability to effectively manage interest rate and liquidity risks, leading to mass deposit flight and ultimately the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), followed by Signature Bank (Signature) and First Republic Bank (First Republic).
The impact of macro-economic and strategic issues has been widely discussed. However, the banks’ inability to appropriately align strategy with the macro environment indicates that insufficient risk oversight was also a significant factor. This, in turn, suggests that stronger corporate governance structures could potentially have assuaged or prevented the outcomes of these events.
In this post we examine risk oversight and board composition gaps at SVB, and compensation practices at all three banks, in discussing how the prominent failures of these three mid-sized financial institutions emphasize the importance and impact of corporate governance practices and disclosures.
