Apollo Global Management's Chief Economist Torsten Slok said that if consumers begin relying heavily on artificial intelligence assistants like Muse to automatically move cash into higher-yielding accounts, it could pose risks to the financial system.
In a report titled "Is an AI-Agent Bank Run Coming?" published on Sunday, Slok stated: "If every household uses AI agents to optimize the returns on their cash balances, banks could lose a significant portion of the low-interest deposits they use to fund loans, and that would become a problem for the entire financial system."
Slok said AI assistants may soon move cash into accounts yielding between 3.3% and 5.0%, while the current national average rate on US checking accounts is just 0.1%. He noted that several fintech companies offer higher deposit rates than banks, including SoFi Technologies (with a deposit rate of 4.5%) and LendingClub, now renamed Happen Inc.
Meta's shares surged earlier this month after it launched Muse, which also quickly climbed to the top of app store rankings.
In recent years, traditional banks were already under pressure from branchless digital banks such as Marcus and Ally Financial. Without the fixed costs of physical branches, these banks are able to offer some of the industry's higher deposit rates.
Bank of America analyst Ebrahim Poonawala said in a report last week that Muse's rapid adoption has raised a risk that "AI agents could erode the customer inertia that underpins banks' low-cost deposits. Chatbots can only tell customers their interest is too low, but AI agents can identify idle liquidity, compare yields and act directly."
Amid these concerns, major bank stocks have already fallen last week. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo both saw their shares drop more than 3% on Tuesday.
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