Banks found it relatively easy to fend off the crypto bros. Artificial intelligence agents may prove a lot harder to tame.

This time last year, stablecoins were all the rage. Armed for the first time with legitimacy from the U.S. Genius Act, these 1:1 digital clones of the greenback seemed poised to go mainstream and take away some of the $19 trillion parked with U.S. lenders — and another $14.5 trillion in dollar deposits at overseas banks. Or so went the story.

A year later, the revolution seems to have fizzled out. Circle Internet Group, the issuer of USD Coin, is valued at $22 billion, down three-fifths from its June 2025 peak. Coinbase Global, the exchange for these tokens, is seeing more institutional adoption, as the likes of Bank of New York Mellon and DBS Group Holdings seek partners to handle demand for crypto services. But stablecoins are a long way from replacing the bank account. For the foreseeable future, they are more likely to be used by corporate treasurers to move funds to countries with poor financial infrastructure than by shoppers standing in a convenience-store checkout.

Banks, however, can’t rest easy. While they were busy lobbying to protect deposits from crypto, AI got smarter. The technology may now be good enough to shake loose the deposits that are just sitting in a clients’ account. The days when lenders made easy money from customer inertia are over.

Transactions where no human swipes a card, presses a button or scans a QR code aren’t exactly new. As McKinsey & Co. points out in its 2026 Global Payments Report, banks are used to such........

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