Somebody at HSBC will be able to wine and dine off of this for the rest of their life.
This isn't 4d giga brain chess stuff, its adults walking into the room. A meaningless tiny bank with assets and liabilities broadly matched has gone under - the regulator has stepped in, phoned around the market and somebody had to take it. £1 is the best they could do - and I expect that it is going to, directly at least, be a loss of money for HSBC all the same.
And yeah, 80 million pounds of profit last year. I'd buy that for a dollar
From here HSBC will spend ~10mil on just the purchase legals. Then they will spend 100s mil when inevitably the equity / bond holders of SVB parent co sue them looking to adjust up the price, and their opening ask will be £1bn+.
All 3,000 business accounts (if there were that many) were up for grabs anyway so they could have had many using a photocopier and handing out flyers at silicon roundabout without any of the hassle.
HSBC looked at their own existing liabilities - looked at how many customers of theirs were paid from SVB (and paid their HSBC mortgages with the proceeds) and did the BoE a favour, and there will be a quid pro quo for that quid they paid at some point.
In business, last years profits are often irrelevant. This is a good example. It's a constant treadmill of trying to stay profitable - which isn't as easy as it sounds.
More so when businesses of this size are usually built on owing large sums of money.