6 posts tagged with "Risk"

I have spent enough time building with AI agents on my own projects to be genuinely impressed by them. I have also spent enough time around banking to know that the harder I imagine putting one to work inside a bank, the faster I hit a wall, and the wall is not technical. It is governance. The moment software stops suggesting and starts acting, the frameworks a bank relies on to stay safe begin to strain.

The hardest part of using AI in banking is not the technology. It is figuring out where AI usage fits inside the vendor management discipline that banks already practice.

I've been thinking about the SVB collapse from the startup side. The banking analysis has been thorough. Duration mismatch, concentrated deposits, digital bank run. But there's another story that hits closer to home. The story of the founders who spent that weekend not knowing if they could pay their teams.

A month out from the SVB collapse, the immediate panic has subsided but the lessons haven't. The biggest one for me is a distinction that sounds simple but changes how I think about risk. SVB was well-capitalized. It ran out of cash. Those are two very different problems.

Silicon Valley Bank failed on Friday in roughly 48 hours. Watching this play out from the inside of the banking industry, what stood out was the speed and how cleanly the mechanics matched what the risk frameworks have always warned about.

Watching what rising rates have done to bank securities portfolios over the past year got me looking into the broader question. Unrealized losses on bonds are one thing. The bigger question is how rate movements affect an entire balance sheet, not just the securities line. That's what interest rate risk actually is, and I've been spending time trying to understand the framework bankers use to manage it.