Federal Reserve Vice Chair of Supervision Michael Barr said Tuesday the Fed is exploring "reverse stress testing" that could be used as a tool to make banks more resilient. This comes as the central bank examines ways to reform bank culture in the aftermath of Silicon Valley Bank's failure in March.

Barr's comments were also made a day before Fed Chair Jay Powell is set to testify to Congress as part of his semiannual monetary policy report.

Investors remain focused on the Fed's next move in interest rates after pausing its rate-hiking campaign last week, but lawmakers are expected to remain focused on the fallout from the collapse of SVB and other banks this spring.

"Instead of thinking of a stressful scenario and then see how it would play through on, say, the balance sheet of a firm, you look at a bank and you say: 'Well, what would it take to break this institution?'" Barr said at a conference at the New York Federal Reserve on reforming banking culture.

Barr said reverse stress testing could be used as a tool to help supervisors recognize more exogenous issues that could go wrong instead of patterns from the past regulators have been trained to catch.

Barr noted Tuesday that regulators were caught off guard by the speed with which Silicon Valley Bank lost 85% of its deposits, an event that went down in just two days compared to prior runs that lasted ten days or more.

"That's not a pattern people had seen before," said Barr.

"We really have to work harder at the kind of things where there [are] patterns we haven't seen before…and so I think [it] begin[s] to help us as supervisors understand the ability to look around the corner."

Barr also said the Fed is looking inward as to why it's slow to move on supervisory issues.

"We have also begun to look more at ourselves and think about our own culture as an institution," said Barr. "One of the things that not only our SVB report, but also the report in the global financial crisis and reports earlier than that, found is that we tend to have a culture that makes it difficult for the institution to act quickly with respect to supervision."