Watch out payments industry, Silicon Valley Bank is coming.
The bank for startups — officially named SVB Financial Group — said last Friday that it was boning up its payments infrastructure and services by “leveraging strategic partnerships to offer scalable and sustainable payment solutions to our clients, at every stage of their lifecycle.”
SVB last month said it was expanding its card-processing relationship with First Data to expand its cross-border commerce solutions. SVB also said its “pipeline [of] E-commerce opportunities has grown substantially since this announcement.” First Data says it “powers” 28% of global e-commerce today.
SVB is also continuing to work with a variety of companies, including MasterCard, “to create flexible, scalable payment solutions that not only make it easy for all our clients to run their business, but allows us to provide complex payment backbone solutions to our fintech clients as part of our banking infrastructure, as a service offering,” the company said last week. That seemingly puts SVB in direct competition with providers of wholesale payments technology and services.
SVB did not elaborate further.
Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base is growing sharply. The bank has enjoyed “double-digit” growth rates in global customers over the last two years, and increased its average global loan balances by nearly 20% last quarter. That growth came mostly from SVB’s UK operation.
SVB said it onboarded more than 1,100 new corporate clients in the second quarter, including 85 new clients.
SVB Financial Group [ticker: SVB] has a market capitalization of about $5.2 billion. Its stock is up about 0.64% today, as of 11 am ET.