mParticle operations are not impacted by the SVB closure

On Thursday afternoon, it was reported that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) had launched a share sale to shore up its balance sheet and by Friday morning it was announced that The California Department of Financial Protection closed Silicon Valley Bank and transferred all insured deposits to the FDIC. mParticle uses SVB as one of our bank accounts and so—as you’d expect—we began receiving inquiries from our customers.

As the center of our customers’ Customer Data Infrastructure, we spend a lot of time thinking about security, reliability, privacy, and continuity. Whether it’s high throughput for real-time data ingestion, redundant availability zones, or segregated pods to protect customer data — we know that an interruption to our business can quickly turn into an unacceptable disruption to our customers. 

This approach extends to the way we manage and protect the funds important to the continuity of our own business operations. We do this in several ways:

1. Diversification
2. Automatic sweep of excess operating funds
3. Redundant operating accounts

We diversify our cash across multiple financial institutions to reduce the risk of a single point of failure or other black swan event.  The majority of our cash reserves are held at non-SVB institutions. For the cash accessible through SVB, we use sweep accounts to maintain an operating balance under the FDIC insurance limit. 

We maintain redundant operating accounts in case of an issue with our primary operating account. We began the process of “failing over” to operating accounts held at another banking partner and expect no disruption to our customer or internal operations.

We’re still far from understanding the overall impact to the startup ecosystem from the closure of SVB. There’s still much to learn about the cause, the eventual resolution, and how we incorporate those learnings to avoid future such events. At minimum, it’s another reminder that there’s value in deliberately thinking about and planning for risks to business continuity—whatever form they may take.