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by rmilk 1197 days ago
Managing that risk is what the customer CFOs were supposed to do. Your average retiree or semi wealthy person knows the FDIC limits and manages their portfolio around them.

This is not a new risk for businesses in any industry and financial services exist to help manage that risk for companies with cash on hand.

I would instead ask why the SVB customers didn’t manage this risk. Others on HN said that banking with SVB was a requirement placed by many VC companies, which does tie the customer’s hands.

1 comments

Are you really expected to spread out all your day-to-day business cash around tons of different accounts just to stay under the FDIC limit? How is that meant to work, logistically?

Let's say you're a company with like 50 well-paid devs, they make 200 grand each on average, so monthly payroll for them is 50 x 200,000 / 12 = ~830,000, so you'd need accounts with four different banks to stay under the FDIC limit just to manage payroll for engineering. What about everything else?