“If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system,” he noted.
Agentic finance refers to AI that acts rather than just answers. These agents can monitor balances in real time, compare returns across institutions, move idle cash into higher-yield accounts and move it back in time for bills.
Estimates of the market’s size vary widely. Mordor Intelligence puts agentic AI in financial services at $7.78 billion in 2026 and projects $43.52 billion by 2031. MarketsandMarkets sizes the narrower AI agents segment at about $845 million in 2025.
Crypto is already building the payment rails these agents would need. Coinbase’s x402 protocol, the most widely used agentic payment standard, lets an AI agent pay for online services in stablecoins within seconds, with no account, card or…
