The employees of Access Speech Therapy in Hanford saw a delayed payroll due to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Facebook photo

One local company found itself directly impacted by the failure last week of Silicon Valley Bank. 

The most recent payroll for Access Speech Therapy in Hanford didn’t go through. The owner is waiting to get the deposited money back.

After an employee raised concerns to Tricia Stone-Shumaker, owner of Access Speech Therapy, she discovered that the payroll company she uses in Ohio works with Silicon Valley Bank for payment services.

 The story was first reported by Rich Rodriguez with KMPH.

“We were not aware that the payroll company used Silicon Valley Bank,” said Stone-Shumaker in an email. “It’s not something we ever felt we needed to know, let alone confirm with the payroll company.”

 As a result, Stone-Shumaker wrote physical checks for her dozen employees and voided the direct deposits because she didn’t want her employees to wait longer than they already had to get paid.

 However, the payroll company confirmed to Stone-Shumaker that direct deposits that were pending from March 10, 13 and 14 will begin rolling out this week and are getting processed.

 At the moment it is unclear when the direct deposits will be voided and refunded. If they are not, Stone-Shumaker will be out double the money for the pay period.

 “Since we voided the initial direct deposit request, the money has yet to be refunded back into our business account. The hope is that we will successfully receive the refund within the next week,” said Stone-Shumaker.

 It was a scenario faced by other businesses across the country. Nima Olumi is the CEO of Lightyear Strategies, a public relations and marketing company based out of Boston, Massachusetts.

His firm’s payroll provider also used Silicon Valley Bank to process payments.

Clients of the payroll provider were notified via email to contact their banks immediately to let them know of a change in payment processors.

“If you do not make this update, your payments, including payroll, will fail,” said the email.

Concerns about Silicon Valley Bank’s financial health surfaced publicly on Thursday, and as a precaution Rippling, the payroll company used by Lightyear, took action to move key elements of its payment infrastructure to JP Morgan Chase & Co. to “minimize risk to the financial operations of our clients.”