Rising from challenges: Stronger and more creative

"The past few months often feel like a scene taken out of a movie. News headlines are filled with stories about recession, increased inflation and interest rates, and – bank crashes. The stock market fluctuations are making us all alert. The crash of Silicon Valley Bank is one example of the implications of these rapid changes in the market," said LeumiTech CEO Timor Arbel-Sadras, speaking at the Mind the Tech London conference on Tuesday. "We at LeumiTech know, that this is a time of stress for many startups and VCs, and we stepped up to help. We've boosted our tech lending framework in order to support growth companies. Our teams worked around the clock, and we’ve helped our customers transfer over a billion dollars to Israel in the first 24 hours after the crash."

Arbel-Sadras detailed the different challenges currently facing startups. "Startups are facing the reality of decreasing valuations, and extreme competition for capital and resources. At the same time, investors stay on the sidelines, shopping around for better deals as the crisis goes on. From the Israeli angle, these conditions are amplified by local political uncertainty. We are following the situation closely and hoping that things will quickly resolve so that the high-tech sector –one of the driving forces of the Israeli economy - will continue to steam ahead.

"But today, I prefer to look beyond the doom and gloom and talk about the rainbow after the storm. How can we come out of this crisis even stronger than before. As the great Winston Churchill once said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Arbel-Sadras shared her prediction regarding when the crisis might end. "Financial crises happen from time to time, but they're not permanent. We've seen this before with the Dotcom Crisis and the Subprime Crisis. Back then, it took about 10 quarters for the market to recover after the Dotcom and about 9 months after the Subprime. Based on that we can estimate that if the current crisis began in early 2022, we might start to see things get better by mid-2024. And once a crisis is over, the markets shoot back up."

You can watch the full video above.