It all started over the weekend with a note from Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok, an influential Wall Street voice. The report’s title asked a straightforward question: “Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming?”
What followed was an avalanche of starkly divided opinions on social media and elsewhere. But economists and researchers contacted by This Week in Fintech agreed — an agentic bank run is (probably) far-fetched, at least for now.
The short report, released on Sept. 27, said that Meta’s AI chatbot Muse, alongside similar systems designed to automate tasks like personal financial management, “could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts.”
Slok warned that as AI agents improve and become more widely adopted amongst consumers, the bots would scour the internet in search of the best deal for their humans — leaving banks short on cash.
“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,” Slok wrote.
The debate is the latest centered on AI and comes less than a month after Meta released Muse. The virtual autonomous assistant can order groceries, book plane tickets and explore the internet for the best bang for your buck.
“If we're projecting to the future, we should be cheering the fact that consumers will be able to get more out of the money that they earn and put it to work,” Christian Catalini, an MIT economist and co-founder of Lightspark, told This Week in Fintech.
“That's how it should be, and the fact that legacy institutions have introduced all sort of frictions to make more money, that's not something that should be defended.”
The Muse agent — personified by a cute, fluffy character you can name — became an overnight hit, immediately rocketing to the top of the free app charts on multiple platforms. Other companies have rushed to release their own versions, including OpenAI, which unveiled Dots, a similar agent, this week.
But Bill Maurer, an anthropologist and scholar at University of California Irvine who studies technological infrastructure, made the argument that a bank run couldn’t happen because of AI agent tech — at least not yet.
“The idea that I could set up Muse to automatically start shifting my balances to banks or fintechs that give me a higher rate of return only works if my banks are supported by Plaid,” Maurer said. “Plaid is not actually connected to all the banks and credit unions in the country.”
Plaid, a fintech whose services help other fintech apps and banks connect to customer accounts, is used by Muse and also OpenAI.
“In theory, sure, this could happen. But there's a number of steps on the way before we even get there, and I would predict for sure that the banks would set up some guardrails against this happening,” Maurer said.
“There is the possibility of this causing a squeeze on liquidity, but again, it really has to happen at scale, and I just don't know if that's possible right now.”
Another problem proposed is trust. For an agentic bank run to happen, a critical mass of consumers would have to trust the technology enough to hand over their accounts to digital assistants and allow them to oversee their financial well being.
But that doesn’t entirely mean banks are safe from AI agents in the future.
Things are going to change, right?,” said Leili Pour Rostami, a finance professor at UMass Boston who specializes in banking, financial institutions and digital assets. “It is not that banks are going to fail, and then individuals are going to just move from one account to another account.”
Rostami said that building trust matters.
“AI agents are so compelling that I don't care about the negative side anymore,” she said. “What I see is something that is going to profit [and] give lots of benefit to me.”
Rostami said banks will have to work harder to maintain their deposit flows in the AI-driven future.
Catalini compared the potential evolution to Blockbuster, which he said heavily relied on late fees for its business structure.
Then, streaming services came along.
“You could imagine a trusted brand building a really amazing financial app that makes sure that your money is put to work, that your investment tracks your retirement plans, and this is all technically possible,” he said.
“When that happens, yes — that's the Netflix moment for the banks.”
(Disclosure: Plaid is the parent company of This Week in Fintech; it has no say in our editorial process.)
