Behind the £1 deal that staved off the tech bank’s collapse in the UK

While its quick slip into financial hardship has left American bankers reeling, its UK division is surprisingly fine. But the tech sector isn’t out of trouble yet

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Last week, if you had heard of Silicon Valley Bank UK, you probably worked in tech. The bank had only been spun out in to a separate entity last summer, after its few thousand corporate customers pushed it over a regulatory threshold, and while SVB had grown to almost hold £10bn of deposits, with £5.5bn of outstanding loans, it was very much a specialist player.

The bank’s selling point was that it understood the needs of the “innovation economy”, something that high street banks frequently failed to acknowledge. A startup might have zero revenue, yet hold £5m in the bank and have 10 employees, a profile fundamentally different from a typical small business. As a result, trying to get something as simple as a corporate credit card could be a surprising hassle, and when SVB arrived on the UK scene, it was enthusiastically adopted by founders and venture capitalists alike.

Spotify is redesigning the core homescreen of its app, trying to make it easier for users to find new stuff to listen to – and watch. The new design goes heavy on imagery and vertical scrolling, turning your homescreen from a set of album covers into a feed that much more closely resembles TikTok and Instagram. As you scroll, Spotify is also hoping to make it easier to discover new things across the Spotify ecosystem.