[kelnos]

I was talking to some friends in finance about this, and unfortunately most of SVB's customers couldn't just pick another bank. Allowing a company to open a business account requires a bank to do a lot of know-your-customer stuff, as well as taking on a bunch of money-laundering and criminal-enterprise risk (that is, there are laws that punish banks if they hold funds that are used for criminal activities, especially terrorism-related activities).

Many banks, even the big ones like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Chase, do not want to do this for random new small companies with no history and unknown founders. SVB was -- I believe -- founded in part to fill this gap.

Beyond that, there are also come contractual relationships between some VCs and SVB that require some VC portfolio companies to hold their deposits (at least some amount of them) with SVB. (I don't entirely understand this point, but even if I'm getting it wrong, the previous point is enough.)