The Zhitong Finance App learned that Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok (Torsten Slok) said that if consumers start to rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) assistants such as Muse under Meta (META.US) to transfer cash to higher-yield accounts, this may pose a risk to the financial system.
Slocke published an article on Sunday entitled “Is Smart Bank Overcrowding Coming?” (Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming?) “If every household uses AI intelligence to optimize the return on their cash balance, banks may lose large amounts of cheap deposits they rely on to issue loans, which will pose a problem for the entire financial system,” the report said.
Slock said that the AI assistant will soon be able to automatically transfer funds from current accounts (the US average interest rate is only 0.1%) and invest in accounts with a yield of 3.3% to 5.0%. He also mentioned several fintech companies that offer higher deposit interest rates than banks, including SoFi Technologies Inc. (SOFI.US), which has a deposit interest rate of 4.5%, and LendingClub (now renamed Happn Inc., HAPN.US).
Earlier this month, Meta shares surged after Muse was released, and the app quickly topped the app list. In recent years, traditional banks have faced competitive pressure from Internet banks such as Marcus and Ally Financial Inc. (ALLY.US) under Goldman Sachs (GS.US). Such institutions can provide the highest interest rates in the industry and are not hampered by the fixed costs of branch offices.
Bank of America analyst Ebrahim Poonawala (Ebrahim Poonawala) said in a report last week that the rapid spread of Muse has once again raised “the risk that AI agents will break the customer inertia that supports low-cost deposits.” “Chatbots can only tell customers that their earnings are too low, while AI agents can identify idle liquidity, compare returns, and perform operations directly.”
Affected by these risk concerns, the stock prices of major banks fell under pressure last week. Among them, J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM.US) and Wells Fargo Bank (WFC.US) both fell by about 3% on Tuesday.