On Sunday, Hunt said he was working with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey to “avoid or minimise damage” resulting from the chaos engulfing the UK arm of the bank.

“We will bring forward immediate plans to ensure the short-term operational and cash-flow needs of Silicon Valley Bank UK customers are able to be met,” Hunt said.

This is just the beginning. SVB had branches in China, Denmark, Germany, India, Israel and Sweden, too. Founders are warning that the bank’s failure could wipe out start-ups around the world without government intervention.

SVB’s joint venture in China, SPD Silicon Valley Bank Co., was seeking to calm local clients overnight by reminding them that operations have been independent and stable.

“This crisis will start on Monday and so we call on you to prevent it now,” UK start-up founders and chief executive officers said in the letter to Hunt. The companies listed in the letter include Uncapped, Apian, Pockit and Pivotal Earth.

The UK Treasury has begun canvassing start-ups, asking how much they have on deposit, their approximate cash burn and their access to banking facilities at SVB and beyond, two people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information is not public. The Treasury declined to comment on the survey.

Silicon Valley Bank staff offered 45 days of work at 1.5 times salary

Founders were anxiously awaiting the outcome of the round table and any information about how their deposits at the bank would be handled. Toby Mather, CEO of UK-based education software start-up Lingumi, has 85 per cent of his company’s cash in SVB. He tried to transfer some of his accounts, but as of Saturday evening, he was not sure whether that worked. “This is life or death for us,” he said. “These things seemed so mundane before.”

Jack O’Meara, founder of the London genomics start-up Ochre Bio, spent the weekend trying, unsuccessfully, to move deposits out of SVB. “If there is no intervention,” he said, “it could really wipe out a generation of entrepreneurial companies.”

As in the US, some SVB deposits in the UK are insured, but it was unclear when those funds would be available. A deeper concern among start-up leaders is that the SVB collapse would throttle future funding from venture capital into the UK, where businesses are already hobbled by Brexit.

Asia’s tech leaders are scrambling to assess the potential ramifications too. In Singapore, financiers and entrepreneurs at a Wharton alumni gathering in the Shangri-La shared news about the fallout, while start-up founders and investors at a conference in Mumbai talked about nothing else.

“The impact of the SVB incident on the technology industry should not be underestimated,” analysts led by Liu Zhengning at China International Capital Corp. said in a note. Deposits are crucial for tech start-ups because they generally require a lot of cash to pay for hefty expenditures including research and development costs and staff salaries, they said.

“If these cash deposits finally have to be impaired in the process of bankruptcy or restructuring, some tech firms may face high cash flow tension,” they said. “The risks of bankruptcy should not be excluded.”

Top financial officials met on Sunday to discuss the collapse, the biggest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis, the finance ministry said in a statement. The ministry said it would closely monitor the situation despite views from experts that the start-up-focused lender’s insolvency would not spill into other financial systems.

Silicon Valley Bank collapses in biggest US bank failure since 2008 crisis

Back in Silicon Valley, US Congressman Ro Khanna from Santa Clara held a town hall late Friday that was attended by more than 600 people including start-up founders, tech leaders and SVB employees. It went on for more than 2½ hours with the primary focus on small businesses trying to make payroll across the nation come Monday.

SVB customers in California, many of them start-up founders, stood outside the bank’s branch on Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road in the cold and rain on Friday, knocking on the locked glass doors and trying to get representatives of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to answer their questions.

A drones start-up founder there said a withdrawal she made on Thursday had not gone through and that she was concerned about making payroll for her 12 full-time employees. She had tried calling the FDIC multiple times, “but the number doesn’t answer”, she said.

Another customer said he should have brought a bottle of whiskey to pass around as they waited. In trying to get more information from an FDIC representative, he said, “Put yourself in our shoes.” The representative apologised before closing the glass door once again.

Some in the VC and start-up world are trying to come up with temporary fixes. Uncapped, a UK financial tech start-up that lends to other start-ups, said it was launching an emergency funding programme to help companies meet payroll and other obligations, as well as longer-term bridging loans to help with working capital.

Alexander Fitzgerald, founder of broadband start-up Cuckoo and a former Treasury official, noted that the finances of British start-ups are already stretched due to a slowdown in venture capital funding market. “British start-ups need the Treasury to step in fast,” he said.

In Canada, SVB Financial Group’s unit in the country reported C$435 (US$314 million) in secured loans last year, double the C$212 million a year earlier, regulatory filings show. Its customers include e-commerce software provider Shopify Inc. and pharmaceutical company HLS Therapeutics Inc., according to a previous statement by the bank.

Toronto-based advertising-tech firm AcuityAds Holdings Inc. revealed on Saturday it had US$55 million in deposits at SVB, amounting to more than 90 per cent of its cash. The firm had halted trading of its stock on Friday after a 14 per cent slump, citing the “unfolding situation” with Silicon Valley Bank.

Additional reporting by Reuters