The Legend of the Smartphone Bank Run

‘The smartphones did it!” has become a refrain from financial regulators during the recent bank panics. The theory is that online banking allows jumpy depositors and investors to jump faster and further than before, leading to bank runs by the nanosecond. Thank Deutsche Bank, then, for shedding new light on this phenomenon—by not having suffered a bank run.

The bank on Thursday reported higher profit in the first three months of the year, largely thanks to rising interest rates. It appears that a moderate outflow of deposits hasn’t become a run of the sort that doomed Credit Suisse and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March. Deutsche says the outflow happened in part as customers switched deposits into higher-yielding investments, and that the flow had started to reverse in April, after the quarter closed.