AI agents capable of managing household finances could gradually pull deposits away from banks by automatically moving money into higher-yielding accounts, Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok warned.
In a Sunday note titled “Is an Agentic bank run coming?”, Slok said AI assistants could eventually compare deposit rates and transfer household cash automatically, creating what he described as a potential “slow-motion bank run.”
Slok pointed to Meta’s personal AI agent Muse and similar agentic systems as examples of technology that could redirect idle cash from checking accounts paying around the 0.1% national average toward accounts offering substantially higher returns.
Torsten Slok is a widely followed investment economist on Wall Street and a partner at Apollo Global, the private-equity firm that manages about $1 trillion in assets.
According to Slok, Revolut, SoFi, Varo, LendingClub and Wealthfront offer deposit rates ranging from 3.3% to 5% annually. At those rates, a $10,000 balance could generate roughly $330 to $500 in yearly interest, compared with about $10 at a 0.1% checking-account rate.
The potential shift matters because banks rely on relatively inexpensive deposits as a source of funding for loans. If AI agents make it easier for households to continuously chase higher deposit yields, banks could lose part of that low-cost funding and face higher costs to finance lending.
“If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans,” Slok wrote, adding that such a development could have implications for the wider financial system.
AI Agents Could Automate Cash Transfers
Agentic finance refers to AI systems that can take financial actions rather than simply provide information.
An agent could track balances in real time, compare rates offered by different institutions, move excess cash into higher-yield accounts and transfer funds back when bills or other payments are due.
Forecasts for the sector vary significantly. Mordor Intelligence estimates the agentic AI market in financial services at $7.78 billion in 2026, with the figure projected to reach $43.52 billion by 2031. MarketsandMarkets estimates the narrower AI agents market at around $845 million in 2025.
Crypto Could Provide the Payment Layer
The crypto industry is already developing infrastructure designed to enable autonomous transactions between AI systems.
Coinbase’s x402 protocol allows AI agents to pay for online services using stablecoins within seconds, without requiring a conventional account, payment card or human authorization for each transaction.
The x402 Protocol has reportedly processed approximately 188 million to more than 205 million cumulative transactions and has around 69,000 active agents.
Cloudflare, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Circle and Stripe are among the companies that have joined the x402 Foundation, which is governed by the Linux Foundation.
Nate Geraci, co-founder of the ETF Institute, has previously said that AI and crypto could both challenge parts of the traditional banking model as financial activity becomes increasingly automated.
