Silicon Valley Bank employees offered 45 days of work at 1.5 times their pay

NEW YORK, March 11 (Reuters) – Employees of a Silicon Valley bank were offered 45 days of employment at one-and-a-half times pay by Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, the U.S. regulator that took control of the collapsed lender on Friday, according to reports viewed by Reuters. An email to departed employees.

Workers will be enrolled by the FDIC and briefed on benefits over the weekend, and health details will be provided by former parent company SVB Financial Group (SIVB.O), the FDIC said in an email titled “Employee Retention” late Friday. Wrote in SVB had a workforce of 8,528 at the end of last year.

Employees were asked to continue working remotely, except for essential workers and branch staff.

The FDIC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Silicon Valley bank imploded after depositors, worried about their financial health, rushed to withdraw their deposits. A two-day frenzied run at the bank blinded observers and stunned markets, wiping out more than $100 billion in the market value of US banks.

SVB was ranked as the 16th largest bank in the United States at the end of last year, with approximately $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in deposits.

“Everyone is working with the FDIC to stabilize the situation as quickly as possible,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

The lender’s main office in Santa Clara, California, and its 17 branches in California and Massachusetts will reopen on Monday, the FDIC said in a statement Friday.

SVB Securities, the broker-dealer owned by the bank’s former parent group, said on Saturday that its business would not be directly affected by the failure of the Silicon Valley bank.

Some businesses with holdings in the failed bank are already receiving offers from hedge funds to buy their stranded deposits for 60 cents on the dollar, a news website Semaphore reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Reporting by Lannan Nguyen in New York and Pete Schroeder and Jason Lang in Washington; Editing by Megan Davis, Franklin Paul and Paul Simao

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