Meta’s Muse and similar AI assistants could soon move household cash from checking accounts paying a national average of 0.1% into accounts paying 3.3% to 5%, Torsten Sløk, chief economist at alternative asset manager Apollo Global Management, wrote in a Sept. 27 note. Sløk framed the scenario as conditional. If every household used AI agents to optimize returns on cash, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, he wrote.
Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8, and the agent passed ChatGPT to reach No. 1 on Apple’s App Store 10 days later, PYMNTS reported. Muse connects to bank accounts through Plaid, the financial data network, which said users can share balances, transactions, investment holdings and mortgage information with the agent. Plaid’s announcement does not describe Muse moving money between banks.
Customer Inertia Kept Deposit Costs Low
Most consumers don’t notice the rate they earn on deposits or lack the time and tools to look for a better one, McKinsey found in its analysis of agentic AI in retail banking. Agents can track balances in real time, compare rates across institutions, move idle cash into higher-yield accounts and return it before bills come due. Consumers already move money when rate gaps widen, as they did during the 2022 shift into high-yield savings, McKinsey noted.
The pool at stake is large. About $7.12 trillion sits in U.S. consumer and business checking accounts, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data cited by The Wall Street Journal. Many customers prefer to keep money at banks they know well. Large banks value direct deposits because those funds rarely move in search of a better rate. The pressure may not stop at deposits. Morgan Stanley Research estimates AI could double the share of borrowers who refinance or prepay mortgages, the Journal reported.
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FinTechs Already Automate Cash Sweeps
Rivo, a San Francisco FinTech, raised $3.1 million in August to automate cash management for consumers, the company said in the launch announcement. Rivo links to a customer’s existing bank account, watches cash flow and moves idle balances into Treasury bills. It pulls the money back in time to cover bills.
Raisin, a deposit marketplace operating mainly in Europe and the U.K., has gathered more than $80 billion and placed it at more than 250 partner banks, McKinsey reported. Under that model, deposits stay inside the banking system and move between banks.
Citi expects any shift to come gradually. Andrew Coombs, head of European financials equity research at Citi, said trust, reliability, transparency and regulation will likely limit the use of third-party agents for banking products, Reuters Live Markets reported Oct. 1. He sees banks building AI tools into their own apps instead. Coombs ranked French, Dutch and German deposit markets as most sensitive to AI-driven pricing. Spanish and Irish markets look best placed, he wrote.
Banks Build Their Own Cash Tools
JPMorgan Chase is building that kind of tool. Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in his annual shareholder letter that the bank would make it easier in 2026 for clients to move money automatically between checking accounts and higher-yielding brokerage products. Clients won’t need multiple steps to shift the cash, Dimon wrote, because “our Smart Cash capability will do it for them.”
Consumers are already handing some of that work to AI. Robinhood now offers AI agents that can trade for retail investors, and the company says agents use its tools almost 30 million times a day, PYMNTS reported. Among the heaviest AI users, 37% rely on AI as their main tool for managing money, PYMNTS Intelligence found. Those power users make up 10% of U.S. consumers.
Cash management is following. Rocket Money’s AI agent, Rowan, cancels forgotten subscriptions and also handles bill negotiation and savings automation, PYMNTS reported. The share of mainstream AI users who rely on AI as their main money management tool doubled from 14% to 28% in one month, PYMNTS Intelligence found.
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