A regional bank is choosing to stick with its area of specialty. There remain banks who specialize in crypto, and differentiate themselves on that basis.
> it just seems morally wrong to me
Only one component is related to withdrawal probability. The others, like service cost, fraud risk, et cetera, are business decisions. It's odd to say a bank choosing a specialty is wrong. (Or vice versa, that a bank should be forced to serve clients it finds morally repulsive.)
That said, you and I see eye to eye when it comes to natural persons: a bare-bones bank account should be entitled to. In the era of cheque-writing, there was a necessary credit component to account opening. That's no longer necessary. (For businesses, it would require dismantling our AML system.)
A bank's entire business model consists of borrowing money for variable-length terms from depositors, and lending it out at fixed-length terms to borrowers.
This question is absolutely the bank's business. In fact, it is the most critical question that a bank needs to be asking itself every single day, if it wants to stay solvent, and actually be able to honor customer withdrawals.
SVB, and its shareholders have been wiped out because it didn't have a good answer to that question.
Alas, the people who dared to think from those first principles are now becoming unbanked from, or denigrated as criminals by, the very system they sought to replace. Perhaps they were onto something.
Folks doing honest research are fine. Those scaling glorified slot machines are having a tougher time.
I think it's quite likely that any society that wouldn't adopt it would be overtaken in economic productivity by a society that did.
> Alas, the people who dared to think from those first principles are now becoming unbanked from, or denigrated as criminals by, the very system they sought to replace. Perhaps they were onto something.
They are generally onto entrusting their money into organizations and investments ran by, or successfully attacked by criminals, which is why crypto money has a disturbingly frequent tendency to go poof.
The moral of the story, here, is that if you have an ideological reason to... Somehow stick it to the man and stay out of the insured banking system, you're going to be in real bad company.
(Also, isn't it kind of weird how quick crypto was to re-invent sub-prime lending, through coin staking, and how quick exchanges are to gamble with and lose customer funds?)
One, correlation. A bank with one $1bn hedge fund is riskier than a bank with a billion $1 individuals. This is the part regulators focus on. (One oversight with SVB was not classifying VCs as quasi-financial institutions.)
Two, reputation. As we've seen, there is a premium to being able to say you're clean of crypto when e.g. Binance or Tether go under.
Three, cost. KYC and AML, for one. (It's why many banks won't open accounts for gambling businesses.) But also how often they use revenue-generating versus free services. If you're constantly wiring in and out your entire balance, you're substantially more costly to your bank than someone who deposits leaves it alone.
Finally, core competence. Flagstar/NYCB focus on a niche. They have built their processes to deal with those customers' demands, trained their staff to be familiar with the, and hired people who like working with them (and with whom they like working). They don't want a bunch of crypto deposits any more than they want aerospace manufacturers'. It's a different business.