In the weeks following Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, JPMorgan has quietly poached dozens of its bankers — and is now gearing up to become a major player in tech circles, sources said.
“JPMorgan has been flooded with hundreds of CVs from former SVB bankers,” a source said. “They’ve jumpstarted the tech banking practice.”
Meanwhile, JPMorgan is also getting its hooks into Silicon Valley through its $10.6 billion purchase of First Republic Bank of San Francisco, according to sources.
“Between the two of them, SVB and First Republic had almost all the high-net-worth individuals on the West Coast,” another tech insider told On The Money.
“JPM got one crown jewel for a steal and the other for free,” the source added. “They dodged a bullet [by passing on SVB] and got the benefits of having all the top SVB people.”
While tech banking has typically been dominated by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan has been uniquely positioned to scoop up the exodus of SVB bankers.
Lateral hires aren’t common at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley has been focused on laying off 3,000 employees instead of hiring new ones.
Neither SVB or SVB Financial Group — which includes an Asset Management, Private Wealth, and Securities business — found a buyer and went into government receivership.
Aggressive SVB bankers eager to grow their career have been forced to look elsewhere — and many landed on JPM in part because a handful of colleagues previously migrated to SVB in 2021.
On The Money previously reported that JPMorgan may have managed to nab most of the customers who fled SVB when it went belly up.
Multiple venture capitalists have privately polled hundreds of tech founders to ask where they moved their bank accounts during the crisis — and more than 90% went to JPMorgan, according to an informal tally shared by the VCs.
JPMorgan’s competitors in retail and commercial banking include Bank of America, which has reportedly added $15 billion in deposits since the US banking crisis kicked off in March.