Who Owns the Agent in the Coming AI War Over Your Bank Account

NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase has begun piloting an artificial intelligence tool called Smart Cash that predicts customers’ cash flow and automatically moves funds to maximize returns, chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum said Tuesday on the bank’s third-quarter earnings call.

The move comes just weeks after Meta launched its AI assistant Muse, amid renewed industry concern that AI agents could sweep deposits out of low-interest bank accounts in search of higher yields.

Smart Cash uses an AI model to forecast a customer’s cash flow needs, identify how much liquidity is actually required and move the remaining funds into higher-yielding products. It is currently experimental and mainly being tested with wealth management clients. JPMorgan has set a $19.8 billion technology budget for 2026.

The stance echoes an earlier dispute between banks and fintech companies over access to customer data. JPMorgan previously sought to charge data aggregators such as Plaid fees for customer data access before striking paid data-access agreements.

On the same call, chief executive Jamie Dimon made clear the bank would not allow external AI agents to directly access accounts. “We’re not going to allow just any … outside agent to come in inside the company, because it’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan,” he said, CNBC reported. “You don’t want rogue agents, and it could be thousands of them.” A JPMorgan spokeswoman confirmed that external AI agents can access read-only data such as balances but do not have execution authority such as moving money or paying bills.

Dimon also warned that liability could shift if customers allow external AI agents to access their accounts. “If people are using them, they should understand the risk,” he said. “They should understand there’s a liability transfer.”

Bank concerns have grown since Meta launched Muse. Muse connects to bank accounts through Plaid, giving the agent read-only access to balances, transaction history and investment holdings. Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, wrote in a Sept. 27 note: “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.” U.S. consumers and businesses hold about $7.12 trillion in checking accounts, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data cited by the Wall Street Journal. If AI agents move that money into higher-yielding accounts, it could raise banks’ funding costs and pressure net interest margins.

Wells Fargo chief executive Charlie Scharf expressed skepticism about AI-agent-driven deposit flight during the bank’s earnings call the same day. “The idea that consumers will give the power to an [AI] agent to act on their behalf, unilaterally moving money around to institutions that they may not know or understand — I think that is a long ways away,” he said, calling the notion of AI-driven mass money movement “completely overdone,” Barron’s reported. Bank of America said in a recent report that AI agents could pose a “multiyear evolutionary risk” to banks’ business models.

Regulators are also moving. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. are updating risk management guidance and preparing requests for information on banks’ use of generative and agentic AI. U.S. lawmakers are also raising the need for regulatory clarity around autonomous AI-agent transactions.

In corporate finance, adoption of AI cash-flow management tools is spreading. PYMNTS Intelligence found that 70 percent of firms surveyed already use at least one AI tool to manage cash flow.

JPMorgan’s Smart Cash is seen as part of a defensive strategy in which banks build their own AI capabilities to counter external AI agents. “The strategic question is not whether AI pulls deposits out of checking, but who owns the agent, the wallet and ultimately the customer relationship,” Bank of America Securities analyst Ebrahim Poonawala said in a Sept. 23 note, Banking Dive reported.