Ledge seizes on SVB crisis with multi-bank offering

Dive Brief:

Israeli finance tech startup Ledge has launched a new tool designed to help CFOs with managing cash across multiple banks.
The product rollout comes as finance leaders put a renewed focus on treasury management in the wake of the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
“There’s suddenly this mass group of companies out there that are now walking into this new reality of trying to manage multiple accounts across different banks, and that’s something that can be very complex to do,” Ledge CEO Tal Kirschenbaum said in an interview.

Dive Insight:

With its new tool, launched in March, the company is aiming to provide finance teams with a simple way to monitor cash balances across bank accounts and to be alerted when a balance gets too high or too low or when anomalies are detected.

“This was always on our product roadmap, but given recent events, we made a decision to try to rapidly accelerate our development plans,” Kirschenbaum said.

Fintech firm Marqeta has hinted at plans for a similar move. During an investor conference last month, Marqeta CEO Simon Khalaf said he expected the company to offer new products that will help customers “achieve stability among multiple banking networks,” as previously reported by Industry Dive sister publication Payments Dive. A company spokesperson declined to provide further details.

The recent failure of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Silicon Valley Bank, followed by a similar crisis at New York’s Signature Bank, has rattled nerves in the corporate finance community, according to a Gartner survey released on March 16.

Eighty-five percent of CFOs expressed concern about the impact of bank failures on their operations, with 18% noting they had some level of exposure to one of the failing banks. More than one in four respondents said they planned to diversify their deposits across more banks.

“This crisis has brought concentration risk into the spotlight, with some companies having upwards of 25% of their cash reserves caught in a failed bank,” Alexander Bant, chief of research in Gartner’s finance practice, said in a press release.