The news: Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok recently warned that AI agents could trigger sweeping bank runs by autonomously moving customers’ money into accounts that pay higher rates. That could eventually threaten the cheap, sticky deposits banks rely on to fund lending.

Those concerns aren’t isolated. Financial institutions, regulators, and lawmakers are grappling with how agentic AI could change depositor behavior, per Politico. 

• Former Treasury domestic finance chief Jonathan McKernan recently warned that banks have historically benefited from the friction involved in moving deposits—and that emerging technologies are beginning to smooth away those frictions. 
• The American Bankers Association has similarly flagged faster and automated money movement as a potential risk from agentic AI.

Why it matters: In some ways, the fears are overblown. 

AI assistants can’t autonomously move consumers’ bank balances today into a different institution—the real human would still have to go through the process of opening a new account and figure out how to move that money over. Plus, smaller depositors have relatively little to gain from constantly moving their money, and trust remains an important reason customers keep deposits with established banks. 

On top of that, 72% of US banking consumers still feel concerned about sharing their finances with AI, per Deloitte data, making widespread adoption unlikely anytime soon. 

But AI could gradually chip away at one of banks’ quietest advantages: customer inertia. 

Consumers leave money in lower-yielding accounts, stay with existing providers, and sometimes miss opportunities to refinance or avoid fees because finding and acting on better options requires effort.

While AI agents won’t automate deposit flight overnight, it could reduce that friction by continuously comparing financial products and alerting consumers to better options.

If customers can easily find and move to whichever provider offers the highest APY, lowest fees, or richest rewards, banks will need stronger reasons for customers to stay even when they aren’t offering the absolute best rate.

Implications for banks: Banks need to understand what makes their customers choose them beyond price.

Convenience, trust, personalized service, branch access, rewards ecosystems, or bundled products could all give customers reasons not to optimize their banking relationships solely around rates.

But banks may need to do more than give customers reasons not to chase the best APY. They need to help customers optimize their finances before an outside AI agent does it for them.

Financial providers already have visibility into customers’ balances and financial behavior that could let their own AI assistants proactively identify opportunities to earn more interest, avoid fees, refinance debt, or use products more effectively. A customer with thousands of dollars sitting in a low-yield checking account, for example, shouldn’t need to ask an external AI whether that money could be working harder in a CD or money market fund.

That could turn AI from a threat to deposit retention into part of banks’ defense. Banks that use their own AI to surface better options internally could give customers fewer reasons to start shopping around in the first place.

Stay tuned: Keep an eye out for our upcoming report, “GenAI and Agentic AI in Financial Services: Winning the AI-Driven Customer Journey.”

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