AI agents could drain cheap bank deposits, Apollo's Torsten Slok warns
In this news:
Key takeaways
- AI agents could optimize cash returns and drain cheap bank deposits.
- Crypto payment rails like the x402 protocol enable instant stablecoin payments.
- Major tech and financial firms have joined the x402 Foundation.
“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,” he noted.
Agentic finance refers to AI that acts rather than just answers. These agents can monitor balances in real time, compare returns across institutions, move idle cash into higher-yield accounts and move it back in time for bills.
Growth and scale of financial AI
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. MarketsandMarkets sizes the narrower AI agents segment at about $845 million in 2025.
Crypto payment rails for AI agents
Crypto is already building the payment rails these agents would need. Coinbase's x402 protocol, the most widely used agentic payment standard, lets an AI agent pay for online services in stablecoins within seconds, with no account, card or human approval.
To date, the x402 Protocol has reportedly processed approximately 188 million to over 205 million cumulative transactions, with around 69,000 active agents. Cloudflare, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Circle and Stripe have joined the x402 Foundation, which the Linux Foundation now governs.
Nate Geraci, co-founder of the ETF Institute, has previously said that AI and crypto are both coming for the traditional banking model.
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