SET Training - Banking and Fintech

After his TerraUSD cryptocurrency imploded, Do Kwon became one of the most wanted men in crypto. Last week, after a global manhunt, he was arrested at an airport in Montenegro. WSJ’s Alexander Osipovich tells the story of how Kwon went from being a major crypto player to facing fraud charges in several countries. Listen to this story from WSJ HERE .

Millions of dollars are stolen from ATMs at the same time in 28 countries. An army of money mules stuff the cash into bags. Do they know who they are really working for? In just over two hours, the thieves take nearly $14 million - all from the accounts of Cosmos Bank in India. The hackers are back! Listen to this fascinating story from the BBC  HERE .

Credit Suisse. Are they like Silicon Valley Bank? And what this all means for depositors and investors!

Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Silvergate bank have all collapsed throwing up a warning signs that something horrible is happening in the economy. But what's the truth here? This is a story of incompetence, a changing economic environment and political lobbying.

A number of things went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank over the last days, weeks and years, there were huge failures of risk management. The risk manager would have some tough questions to answer, except that it appears that they didn’t have a risk manager on staff for almost nine months of the last year. There were issues tied to the different regulations applied to community banks when compared to national banks in the United States. There were investment decisions that were made that are difficult to understand, and the final stroke was a capital raise attempt that had next no chance of succeeding. You can’t raise capital from investors on the same day that you announce a close to two-billion-dollar hole in your balance sheet and the equity is tanking in value. Anyhow, let’s go over the issues at Silicon Valley Bank, try and understand how banks work, look at the latest news (at date of publication), and try to imagine how things might work out going forward.

Banks don’t fail very often, and bank runs appear to be mostly a thing of the past. The last bank failure in the United States happened in 2020 when a small bank in Kansas failed. That two-year streak was broken this Wednesday with the failure of the crypto focused bank Silvergate, and on Friday with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.