Torsten Slok at Apollo asks whether an agentic bank run is coming.¹ I think the risk might go further than his warning.

His point is this: once agents like Meta’s Muse can move money, they could sweep household cash out of US checking accounts paying around 0.1% into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%.¹ ² Banks could lose some of the cheap deposits they rely on to lend, and as this is adopted more widely, could significantly change the funding patterns for banks. His example looks to the US, but similar analysis applies in many markets, including South Africa.

The first implication is agents enforcing better information and competition – more efficiency the micro economists will be pleased to note. Superficially, that might put upwards pressure on deposit rates, providing better value for banking customers (at least the depositors) at the cost of the bank or their borrowing customers. Lending rates take time to adjust. In the interim, higher deposit rates being offered may erode bank deposit spread or net interest margin. Thinner margins raise risk for banks too. (Higher risk because lower baseline profits makes it slower to rebuild capital, more likely to make losses, but also because it may prompt greater risk-taking to grow the margin.) Whether you want banks to be more or less profitable is your call. I’m conflicted (in both senses of the word) so I’ll stay quiet on that point.

Next: speed. Lower friction and constant comparison mean small rate differences can drive large flows. Deposits become less sticky. Some of this money stays in the banking system, moving from one bank to another, whereas others may go to money market accounts or that other major 2020s development, the stablecoin, and thus into US treasuries or other pool of generally low risk non-banking assets. The damage is to each individual bank’s funding stability, but potentially also the total available deposit base for the banking system as a whole. (Stablecoins, at least in the US, can’t pay interest, but there are grey areas here related to funds and rewards.)

Slok’s run is yield-driven sorting. But I want to take it a step further – and into risk.

If deposits are now less sticky, banks are more exposed to liquidity shortfalls. Greater risk of failure is definitely relevant to the decision of where to place funds, and agents are likely better suited to evaluating and re-evaluating this quickly. So agents won’t just chase yield. They will become risk-aware too. (I said risk-aware, not self-aware.)

As an individual, it is sensible to want an agent that moves your money into the right risk-adjusted accounts or funds, and quickly away from a bank perceived to be risky. What is logical for you is logical for everyone else. Today, our different information sources, different viewpoints, distractions and delays mean these decisions are for the most part poorly coordinated. Tomorrow, many agents, acting on the same triggers and signals, could pull money out of a single bank at something closer to the speed of high-frequency trading than of a Sunday newspaper reporting last quarter’s filings. Humans have already been getting faster – and I’m not talking about Usain Bolt. On 9 March 2023 Silicon Valley Bank lost over $40 billion of deposits in a day, and expected over $100 billion more the next.³

So agents optimising for yield could raise the risk of a run on certain banks, then respond in a correlated (if not coordinated) manner to that higher risk, amplifying and accelerating the risk.

Deposit insurance limits this, but only partly. A risk-aware agent might keep balances within the insured limit (US$250,000 in the US, R100,000 per depositor per bank under South Africa’s Corporation for Deposit Insurance).⁴ But just because deposit protection exists doesn’t mean there isn’t a frictional cost to being a depositor that wants money here, today and right now rather than wait for regulatory processes. Besides, deposit insurance has its own economics. There isn’t some infinite well of funds to bail out depositors. The point of deposit insurance is to reduce the failures in the first place. But at the limits imposed, it only protects small savers. It concentrates run risk in uninsured balances. Just to explain the scale of the mismatch of funds and insured funds: at Silicon Valley Bank, about 94% of deposits were uninsured.³ To be fair, SVB was an outlier. The peer average was around 41% at the time.

Banks face pressure from two directions. They must pay competitive rates to hold on to deposits. But this newly-volatile deposit funding is riskier than in the past, so they may prefer longer-term funding and be prepared to pay more for it, and less for the now unattractive overnight deposit. Deposit rates might therefore settle lower or higher than today. That depends on risk appetite and on supply and demand, including the impact of non-bank alternatives, the so called shadow banking world, and the impact of stablecoins (and central bank digital currencies in some parts of the world). I don’t think anyone can really know the equilibrium of this complex system in advance. Or if there even is something that could be described as an equilibrium rather than a dynamic moving target.

There is some familiar prisoner’s dilemma stuff going on here. For an individual, using an agent looks clearly positive. Up until many people use the same or correlated agents. Then it may be bad for the system as a whole. One outcome is more concentration in “too big to fail” banks, which carries its own costs. Another is individual bank failures. Either way the transition may be disruptive. But back to the individual prisoner – if the system is newly unstable and risky, isn’t that just a further argument to use an agent?

The difference this time is that every prisoner has hired the same lawyer.

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¹ Torsten Slok, “Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming?”, Apollo, The Daily Spark, 27 September 2026. https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/is-an-agentic-bank-run-coming

² Plaid, “Plaid powers Meta’s new AI agent, Muse”, 8 September 2026. https://plaid.com/blog/meta-muse/

³ Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Review of the Federal Reserve’s Supervision and Regulation of Silicon Valley Bank”, April 2023. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/svb-review-20230428.pdf

⁴ South African Reserve Bank, “CODI Frequently Asked Questions”. https://resbank.co.za/en/home/what-we-do/Deposit-insurance/CODI-Frequently-Asked-Questions