(Abdul–Rahman Oladimeji Bello, Headline USA) Signature Bank, the failed anti-Trump bank shut down by New York’s state regulators, became a hot topic online after an ill-conceived ad from the disgraced institution went viral.
The ad, featuring a parody of Fun.’s “Some Nights,” broke the internet immediately after it was released, garnering over 700,000 views in a few hours, according to the Daily Mail.
The bank, which had invested heavily in cryptocurrency, reportedly had total assets worth $110.4 billion and total deposits of $88.6 billion as of December 2022. However, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is now in control after regulators shut it down.
Grit Capital Founder Genevieve Roch–Decter slammed the parody ad via Twitter, saying that there was no way the bank would have escaped its current fate after having spent “millions of dollars to produce music videos & TV shows about themselves.”
In a separate tweet, Roch–Decter mentioned that a former bank employee had told her, “The Management Team was basically like the show, the Office. They’d waste money on things like producing parody videos.”
From someone I know who worked at Signature Bank for several years:
"The Management Team was basically like the show, the Office. They'd waste money on things like producing parody videos."
— Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA (@GRDecter) March 13, 2023
Additionally, Roch–Decter posted another parody video by the bank, which was more of a musical comedy sketch.
In her caption, she asked why the bank believed anyone would have trusted them with their money after watching those videos.
“This is a circus, not a bank,” she wrote.
Who would have trusted their money to these guys after watching this video?
This is a circus not a bank. pic.twitter.com/UYXxyifD4b
— Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA (@GRDecter) March 13, 2023
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis also noted during an interview Sunday for Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures that several recently failed financial institutions had misplaced their priorities, the Daily Mail reported.
“They are so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff, and I think that diverted them from focusing on their core mission,” DeSantis said, echoing other conservative criticisms of Silicon Valley Bank’s decision to prioritize virtue-signaling over financial solvency.
SVB claimed to have no personnel in charge of risk management for eight months leading to January 2023, according to Fortune.
The Daily Mail report noted that the bank leaders in charge of risk assessment in the United Kingdom failed to understand their job roles properly as they focused more on “pro-diversity initiatives.”
In addition, Jay Ersapah—the chief risk officer in Europe, Africa and the Middle East—prided herself as a “queer person of color,” and seemed to focus more on woke initiatives than the core functions of her job.
