Apollo's Torsten Slok warns AI agents could drain cheap bank deposits
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok says AI assistants that sweep household cash into higher-yield accounts could slowly drain the cheap deposits banks rely on to fund loans.
Key points
- Slok made the warning in a Sunday note titled "Is an Agentic bank run coming?"
- He cited Meta's personal agent Muse and similar assistants as the kind of tool that could move cash automatically.
- Checking accounts pay a national average of 0.1%, while Revolut, SoFi, Varo, LendingClub and Wealthfront pay between 3.3% and 5%.
- On a $10,000 balance that is about $100 a year in interest versus roughly $10 from checking.
- Coinbase's x402 protocol has reportedly processed about 188 million to over 205 million cumulative transactions with around 69,000 active agents.
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok has warned that AI agents could drain cheap bank deposits, setting off what he called a slow-motion bank run. In a Sunday note titled "Is an Agentic bank run coming?", he said AI assistants that manage household money could automatically sweep cash out of low-interest checking accounts and into higher-yield alternatives, CoinDesk reports.
Slok is one of the most widely read investment economists on Wall Street and a partner at private-equity firm Apollo Global, which manages about $1 trillion in assets. His argument is that banks depend on inexpensive deposits to create credit, so a broad shift of household cash would hit their funding base and pose a risk to the wider financial system.
The gap between the two options is large. Slok noted that checking accounts pay a national average of 0.1%, while firms including Revolut, SoFi, Varo, LendingClub and Wealthfront pay between 3.3% and 5% on deposits. On a $10,000 balance, that is roughly $100 a year in interest against about $10 from a checking account.
Slok's agentic bank run warning
He pointed to Meta's personal agent Muse and similar agentic AI assistants as tools that could soon move that cash automatically. Agentic finance describes AI that acts rather than simply answers: such agents can watch balances in real time, compare returns across institutions, shift idle cash into higher-yield accounts and move it back in time for bills.
Slok said 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 described as a problem for the entire financial system.
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, while MarketsandMarkets sizes the narrower AI agents segment at about $845 million in 2025.
Deposit rates and the yield gap
Crypto payment infrastructure is already being built for these agents. Coinbase's x402 protocol, described as the most widely used agentic payment standard, lets an AI agent pay for online services in stablecoins within seconds without an account, card or human approval. It has reportedly processed about 188 million to over 205 million cumulative transactions, with around 69,000 active agents, and the x402 Foundation now governed by the Linux Foundation counts Cloudflare, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Circle and Stripe among its members.