What international bank would you recommend for a young company with less than $25 million in sales?

Those two banks offer an interesting contrast. I was CFO of a company that used SVB when we had US HQ and operations in Japan and Korea. There is no doubt that SVB offers better account management with more hands-on support from folks at the bank. That is a great upside. You know who you are dealing with and they are good people. The downside was that we had to work through partner banks for many global issues since SVB did not have physical presence where we needed it. Things got done (LOCs, wires, cash mgmt), but we had to open accounts in local banks to hook up to our SVB accounts.

With Wells and the other global giants, my experience has been that there is more turnover in the positions you deal with most as a client, and those folks are not as good at their jobs. However, the bank is everywhere, and thus you have one system for managing all assets, one system for transactions, etc., and the bank can do everything for you without having to go outside.

Thus, a study in contrast. We stuck with SVB due to the better support, but i have used the bigger banks at other companies. I think these are the core issues, however, and you should focus on support and banking features and systems when you are interviewing banks.