Apollo economist warns AI agents could drain bank deposits
Apollo's chief economist says autonomous AI agents could move household cash into higher-yield accounts, starving banks of cheap deposits and speeding up runs in a crisis.
Key points
- Torsten Slock, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, warned that AI agents could shift household cash into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0% instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts.
- Apollo holds over a trillion dollars in assets under management, according to the report.
- Slock cited Meta's Muse as an example of an agent that can operate autonomously without user input.
- Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly said agents have much lower diversity of behaviour than humans, so cascading runs would likely be more violent and sudden.
- The deposit-flight argument echoes concerns raised by community banks over stablecoin yields, which featured in the CLARITY Act's failure in the Senate.
Apollo Global Management's chief economist has warned that AI agents could trigger massive bank runs by moving household cash out of low-paying accounts. Torsten Slock, a former International Monetary Fund employee and partner at the firm, said the spread between fintech yields and those paid by FDIC-insured banks creates a significant imbalance that agents could exploit.
In a short article, Slock said widespread adoption of agentic assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, rather than the 0.1% national average on checking accounts. He pointed to agents such as Meta's Muse, which can operate autonomously without user input, as the kind of tool that could carry out such reallocation.
The warning rests on the role of cheap deposits in bank funding. Slock argued that if every household used AI agents to optimise the return on its cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which he said would be a problem for the entire financial system. The rise of higher-yield institutions such as Revolut in the United States could push agents to move funds to newer banks, making traditional savings accounts obsolete, according to the report.
Apollo warns on deposit flight
Although Slock did not mention stablecoins directly, Bitcoin.com News reports that his argument echoes what community banks have said might happen if financial institutions were allowed to offer yields on crypto deposits. That concern was one of the arguments behind the failure of the CLARITY Act in the Senate, where community banks led opposition and demanded a total ban on stablecoin rewards.
The agentic bank run thesis has drawn criticism. Some observers said it would not produce a total bank run, but rather the end of cheap funding and of return on equity for banks that fail to adapt. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, said business models built on friction and human laziness would rightly be slaughtered in the coming years.
Qureshi nonetheless agreed that agents would accelerate bank failures in situations like the one Silicon Valley Bank faced in 2023. He said agents have much lower diversity of behaviour than humans, concluding that cascading agentic bank runs will likely be more violent and sudden than human ones.
Stablecoin yield fight echoes
The debate matters because deposit funding underpins bank lending, and any structural shift in where household cash sits could reshape the economics of traditional banking. It also links the emerging agentic AI sector to an existing policy fight over whether crypto firms should be allowed to pay yields on deposits.