Vice Chairman & Chief Financial Officer, Western Alliance Bancorp
Search every verified Dale Gibbons interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a September 2023 interview, Dale Gibbons stated that Western Alliance Bancorp is "very strong" and attributed the bank's initial involvement in the regional banking crisis to its subsidiary Bridge Bank being a direct competitor to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). He said the bank has since "educated our depositors and the street" about its differences from SVB, noting that its tech exposure was only 13 percent. Gibbons described the banks that failed as "monoline institutions" and said Western Alliance is "doubling down" on diversification. Gibbons said he "welcomes more regulation," describing the issues at SVB as a "management failure" that regulators should have addressed earlier. He argued that "capital doesn't replace incompetence" and that both are needed. He also stated that without revisions to deposit insurance mechanisms, regional banks will face challenges, potentially leading to a "barbell banking industry" with very large and very small institutions but little in between. Gibbons noted that regional banks have been growing faster than large banks due to faster decision-making and that they have been more responsive to rising interest rates.
“We welcome more regulation. I think that what happened to SVB with their large debit and their securities book was a management failure and should have been pounded on by the regulators, which really didn't happen until it was too late. That's a better solution than just throwing capital at the problem.”
“Capital is really important as a fundamental element of confidence the public can have, but capital doesn't replace incompetence. You really need both to be able to do that. Capital levels in the US are higher than almost anywhere else in the world; it is a strongly capitalized industry.”
“Each of the banks that failed were essentially monoline institutions: SVB was the tech bank, Signature Bank was largely the crypto bank, and First Republic was the private bank. We pride ourselves on diversification and are doubling down on that today.”
“Regional banks have been growing at a faster rate than the large banks because they are typically faster to market and faster in decision making. Larger banks have more bureaucracy which slows everything down.”
“Posted rates at the large banks are very nominal despite interest rates rising 500 basis points in the past year, while regional banks and smaller ones have been much more responsive to the change in rates.”
“Without revisions to deposit insurance mechanisms, regional banks will face challenges in growing and providing larger loans, leading to a barbell banking industry with very large institutions and very small community banks, but little in the middle.”
“We quickly put out an 8K and a press release describing how different we were from SVB, highlighting that our insured deposit levels are more than 10 times what theirs were, which helped calm things down and our stock more than doubled going into the close on that Monday.”
“The deposits moved very quickly and in unison, which was surprising. We now have a different assumption set about how stable those deposits might be going forward.”
“Banks are the primary provider of credit and the engine for the economy. We all share the goal of a strong industry with high public confidence, which contributes to the success of Western Alliance and the industry at large.”
Western Alliance CFO Dale Gibbons joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the recovery from this year's banking crisis, the outlook ...
Sign in to search the full transcript archive, filter by topic, and access every quote from Dale Gibbons.
The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →