"AI assistants may soon run your financial life. That could be a big problem for banks."
The prospect of losing deposits sitting in checking and savings is especially troubling for banks, which rely on those funds to make loans that help keep the economy humming, pocketing the extra interest they make.
yeees, yeeees... #1595179
“Consumer inertia has been a very powerful force in shaping the financial industry,” said John Campbell, a professor of economics at Harvard University.
This objection/observation is pretty badass: lol, retail customers... you're plebs; you have no funds to speak of!
Many Wall Street analysts don’t think a draining of deposits would happen overnight, if at all. For one,banks’ larger institutional clients are largely already doing this as a part of so-called treasury management, which involves moving cash into higher-yielding accounts or using it to pay down debt. Consumer accounts may only have a few thousand dollars in balances, and thus relatively less to gain.
Indeed:
Meta has promoted Muse as an instant money saver, with the ability to help renegotiate your utility bills or spot subscriptions you’re not using. It can act autonomously on a person’s behalf (though it can’t currently move account balances on its own) and has sponged up users since its debut. The idea that AI agents could level the playing field in consumer finances relies on the assumption that bots will recommend the best product or money-saving tactic.
Isn't another way to phrase this:
AI assistants make banks compete for deposits again
If everybody is moving their money around to the best money market fund or the lowest cost checking accounts, it means banks can't rely on stodgy, complicated, false-friction to keep customers penned up in their fold.
They aren't even arguing that customers are moving to riskier products or that they will potentially be scammed, just that banks apparently had no reason to offer competitive products to their customers, but now they might.
Consumer financial products really do suck.
What if they start gaming the AIs like people started gaming Google with SEO?
Then we make Zuck obsolete by perfecting local LLM harnesses. If you can save 2 grand on your bills every month, you're break even after 6 months if you buy a Macbook pro M5 max at current insane pricing. Plus Zuck won't get to steal your data. Big benefit that people will only realize when it is too late.
article concluded that, too; the Harvard profs suggested well, if too entrenched it might just become a sponsored thing... banks pay Anthropic or whatever to make the customer do something slightly better/less bad for the bank. LOL OWNED
That conclusion is too strongly stated. Agents will level the playing field if they can recommend better products and practices. They don’t need to be the best.
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