The Big OneBanking & Lending
Apollo economist warns AI agents could drain banks of cheap deposits
Updated
Torsten Slok, Apollo's chief economist, asked "Is an agentic bank run coming?" in a note arguing that AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically out of checking accounts paying around 0.1 percent into accounts yielding 3.3 to 5 percent. If every household did that, he said, banks could lose much of the cheap deposit funding they lend from.
NoteDigital bank runs so far have needed people to panic together. An agent chasing yield needs only the rate gap, so a gap between checking and savings rates that regulators have long tolerated starts to look like a standing risk to deposit funding.
Correction: An earlier version said Torsten Slok described AI agents moving deposits all at once in a synchronized, machine-speed run. His note does not say that, so those words have been removed, along with a secondary source that used them.