SVB Doubled Its Canada Loan Book in Year Before Collapse

Derek Decloet, Bloomberg News

The lights were out at Silicon Valley Bank’s office in Toronto on Friday afternoon after the parent bank was shut down. , Photographer: Derek Decloet/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- SVB Financial Group’s Canadian unit doubled the size of its loan portfolio last year as it sought to capitalize on the growth of the country’s technology sector, regulatory filings show.

The Canada division, which received a license to open in 2019, ended last year with C$435 million ($314 million) in secured loans, the documents say. That was a tiny part of SVB’s balance sheet, but it was twice the C$212 million in loans the bank reported a year earlier.

SBV had only a foreign bank branch license, so it wasn’t eligible to take retail deposits. And documents filed with the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions indicate that almost all of the funding for the Canadian operation came from its head office and other financial institutions, not deposits from business clients.

Canadian customers included e-commerce software provider Shopify Inc. and pharmaceutical company HLS Therapeutics Inc., according to a previous statement by the bank.

“They provided us debt financing early and as we grew,” Andrew Graham, co-founder and chief executive officer of credit-score company Borrowell Inc., said on Twitter on Friday, shortly before SVB collapsed in the biggest US bank failure since 2008.

Graham said the company didn’t have any current loans or accounts with SVB. He described the bank’s demise as “shocking and sad.”

On Friday afternoon, the lights were turned off in SVB’s Toronto office and nobody answered the door. Former American Express and PayPal executive Paul Parisi was the bank’s head of Canada.

A spokesperson for OSFI declined to comment.