AI agents could drain cheap bank deposits, Apollo's Torsten Slok warns

AI assistants that manage household money could set off a slow-motion bank run, Apollo’s Chief Economist Torsten Slok warned in a Sunday note titled “Is an Agentic bank run coming?”

Slok said Meta’s personal agent Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash into high-interest accounts automatically, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts.

Torsten Slok is one of the widely read and influential investment economists on Wall Street. He is also a partner at private-equity giant Apollo Global, which manages about $1 trillion in assets.

Slok highlighted that firms such as Revolut, SoFi, Varo, LendingClub and Wealthfront paying between 3.3% and 5% annual interest on deposits. That amounts to about $100 in annual interest on a $10,000 balance, versus just $10 from checking accounts.

He therefore argues that if households widely use agentic AI to make investments, it could put banks – which depend on cheap deposits to create credit – at risk, posing a threat to the broader financial system.

“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, which would be a problem for the entire financial system,” he noted.

Agentic finance refers to AI that acts rather than just answers. These agents can monitor balances in real time, compare returns across institutions, move idle cash into higher-yield accounts and move it back in time for bills.

Estimates of the market’s size vary widely. Mordor Intelligence puts agentic AI in financial services at $7.78 billion in 2026 and projects $43.52 billion by 2031. MarketsandMarkets sizes the narrower AI agents segment at about $845 million in 2025.

Crypto is already building the payment rails these agents would need. Coinbase’s x402 protocol, the most widely used agentic payment standard, lets an AI agent pay for online services in stablecoins within seconds, with no account, card or human approval.

To date, the x402 Protocol has reportedly processed approximately 188 million to over 205 million cumulative transactions, with around 69,000 active agents.
Cloudflare, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Circle and Stripe have joined the x402 Foundation, which the Linux Foundation now governs.

Nate Geraci, co-founder of the ETF Institute, has previously said that AI and crypto are both coming for the traditional banking model.