After Meta Muse: What Personal Assistants Mean for Banking

New white paper from Stone Mantel Press | By Dave Norton, PhD, Founder and Principal

On September 27, Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Slok, sent clients a note titled "Is an Agentic bank run coming?" Three weeks earlier, Meta had launched Muse, connected to more than 12,000 U.S. financial institutions through Plaid. Most bankers who answered Slok said no, and they're probably right about the run. Jeff McMillan, who led firm-wide AI at Morgan Stanley, named the real risk: "What Torsten describes is repricing, not a run."

Personal assistants are the third shift in how Americans bank. Online banking moved the teller line to a screen. The app turned banking into a habit. The assistant reads every account a person has, at every institution, and tells them what to do with the money. The average checking account pays about 0.1% while online accounts pay 3.3% to 5%, and 20% of customers moved money out of their primary bank in the last three months.

Muse reads situations: the paycheck landing, the balance dropping, the bill coming due. It can't read the mode a customer is in when money goes wrong: the stress of a low balance, the panic of a scam, the scramble of an emergency expense. Banks and credit unions that map their situational markets, then design for the modes inside them, can keep the relationship the assistant is trying to take over.

The white paper covers:

• How online banking, the app and the assistant each changed who holds the customer relationship

• Why deposit inertia is ending, and how much low-cost funding is exposed

• What moves to the assistant first, from advice to moving money to running the household's finances

• What Muse sees (situations) and what it can't see (modes), using Brightwater Bank, a composite regional bank

• Six steps for banks and credit unions, plus three questions for your leadership team

Read the white paper: After Meta Muse for Banking

The assistants are already reading the statements. The only question left is whether they will move the money somewhere else.