Signature Bank executives starred in gruesome Broadway-style sketch

Recently resurfaced videos show Signature Bank’s executive team singing and dancing while promoting the new financial institution in the early 2000s.

Co-founder Scott Shay even declares triumphantly that the bank would never “sink or fail,” as he, Vice President John Tamberlane, and CEO Joseph DePaolo considered starting their own bank in their seemingly first commercial.

It was just one of several embarrassing videos executives would create over the years, spending millions of dollars to do so, with one former employee telling Genevieve Roch-Decter: “The management team was basically like The Office show. “.

After just 22 years in business, Signature Bank collapsed Sunday and was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Federal authorities are now trying to find a potential buyer for the failed bank, as experts fear the effects of its collapse and that of Silicon Valley Bank will be felt throughout the economy.

The video was his opportunity to promote Signature Bank for the first time after its launch in New York in 2001.

The video posted to Twitter on Monday begins with co-founder Shay complaining about the status quo in banking.

“Look, the only way we’re going to do this is if we start a bank from scratch,” he says as he, Tamberlane and DePaolo sit in front of a mirror in a dressing room where a woman is applying makeup to her face. .

Tamberlane seems surprised by the proposal when he asks: ‘From scratch? You got to be kidding!’

At which point, DePaolo asks, ‘How the hell would you do that? Is there a book How to build a bench for dummies?’

The three then seem to conclude that they would have to make their own mistakes and “we would have no one to blame but ourselves.”

That’s when they start to sing and say: the idea of ​​starting your own bank is ‘the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard’.

We’re sick of the big bank stench, so shall we start one? It’s absurd’, sing the three financial gurus. ‘What a terrible proposition, like convincing the world to eat kale.

‘What possible fate will be for our bank other than to decline and fail?’ other actors ask as if they could predict what would become of Signature Bank.

But in the video, Shay turns around and tells her colleagues, “I know for a fact that won’t happen,” while introducing Signature Bank for the first time.

They concluded by promising to ‘build to last and captivate’.

Other actors then say that the idea is absurd and that their bank would be destined to ‘decline and fail’.

Actors promise Signature Bank is ‘built to last and captivate’

Another video shows them pulling tarred people out of other ‘generic megabanks’

Other videos produced by bank executives show staff members singing a version of Some Nights by Fun, in which they say they ‘stand for honesty, stand for integrity.’

And in a third video they seem to ‘pluck’ feathered clients from ‘generic megabanks’.

But after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse on Friday, New York officials were investigating financial institutions with similar practices when they placed Signature Bank under the jurisdiction of the New York Division of Financial Services.

It would later be taken over by the FDIC.

Both banks ran into trouble when they did not have enough liquidity to cover a series of recent withdrawals.

But former Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who helped write legislation to regulate banks, said Monday he believes state officials were just trying to make an example of Signature Bank, and that its government takeover was a wrong move.

However, he is now under fire for serving on the bank’s board of directors.