AI agents could drain cheap bank deposits, Apollo's Torsten Slok warns
Apollo Global chief economist Torsten Slok warned that agentic AI assistants that automatically shift household cash into higher-yield accounts could drain banks' low-cost deposits and trigger a slow-moving bank run. He highlighted that fintechs and digital banks are offering multi-percent deposit rates compared with the roughly 0.1% national average for checking accounts, and that crypto payment rails already exist to enable such automated transfers.
Why It Matters
If widely adopted, agentic finance could remove a key source of cheap funding banks use to make loans, potentially disrupting credit intermediation and posing systemic risks. The combination of higher retail deposit yields, AI automation, and crypto payment infrastructure could accelerate how quickly cash migrates away from traditional banks.
Key Facts
- Source: Note by Torsten Slok, Apollo Global (published Sep 28, 2026)
- Apollo assets under management: About $1 trillion
- Average national checking account yield cited: 0.1%
- Higher-yield deposit rates cited: Between 3.3% and 5% at firms like Revolut, SoFi, Varo, LendingClub and Wealthfront
- Illustrative interest on $10,000: $100 annually at 1% vs $10 at 0.1% (Slok's comparison)
Apollo Global’s chief economist Torsten Slok warned in a Sept. 28 note that agentic AI — systems that act on users’ behalf rather than only responding to queries — could trigger a gradual bank run by shifting household cash from low-yield checking accounts into higher-yield alternatives. Slok pointed to personal agents such as Meta’s Muse and other forthcoming assistants that could monitor balances, compare rates in real time and move idle funds into accounts offering several percentage points more interest.
Slok noted that while the national average yield on checking accounts is roughly 0.1%, a number of digital banks and fintechs currently advertise deposit rates between about 3.3% and 5%. He used an example where a $10,000 balance would earn roughly $100 a year at higher rates compared with about $10 from a typical checking account, arguing widespread automation of such reallocation could deprive traditional banks of the cheap deposits they rely on to fund lending.
The note also highlights how payments and crypto infrastructure are already enabling agentic finance. The x402 protocol, described as a widely used agentic payment standard, allows AI agents to pay for services in stablecoins within seconds without a human approving each transaction. Reports cited in Slok’s note put x402’s cumulative transactions in the range of about 188 million to over 205 million, and around 69,000 active agents; Cloudflare, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Circle and Stripe are participants in the x402 Foundation now governed by the Linux Foundation.
Market research quoted in the note shows varying estimates for the size of AI agents in finance: Mordor Intelligence projects the segment at $7.78 billion in 2026 and growing to $43.52 billion by 2031, while MarketsandMarkets places the narrower AI agents segment at about $845 million in 2025. Slok and other observers, including ETF Institute co-founder Nate Geraci, have suggested that the combined forces of AI and crypto could challenge traditional banking models if agentic systems are broadly adopted.
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