A top Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. official said the agency could have moved more quickly to find a buyer for Silicon Valley Bank after it failed last month, suggesting a lack of urgency worsened the crisis that sent tremors through the banking system, the Wall Street Journal reported. Travis Hill, the FDIC’s vice chairman and one of two Republicans on its five-member board, said the agency was too slow in setting up a platform for potential bidders to look at SVB’s finances after its closure on March 10. The so-called data room allows would-be buyers to perform due diligence on a bank’s business. Hill also said in a speech on Wednesday that policy changes made by FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg might have hurt the regulator’s access to the bank’s data. He said it was a mistake to scrap a plan to develop a new reporting prototype aimed at providing the agency with more timely and targeted data about banks’ credit exposures and deposit information.
