Money Talks: AI Agents for Cash Management in Payment Systems

Iñaki Aldasoro and Ajit Desai

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: Using prompt-based experiments with ChatGPT’s reasoning model, we evaluate whether a generative artificial intelligence (AI) agent can perform high-level intraday liquidity management in a wholesale payment system. We simulate payment scenarios with liquidity shocks and competing priorities to test the agent’s ability to maintain precautionary liquidity buffers, dynamically prioritize payments under tight constraints, and optimize the trade-off between settlement speed and liquidity usage. Our results show that even without domain-specific training, the AI agent closely replicates key prudential cash-management practices, issuing calibrated recommendations that preserve liquidity while minimizing delays. These findings suggest that routine cash-management tasks could be automated using general-purpose large language models, potentially reducing operational costs and improving intraday liquidity efficiency. We conclude with a discussion of the regulatory and policy safeguards that central banks and supervisors may need to consider in an era of AI-driven payment operations.

Keywords: Digital currencies and fintech; Financial institutions; Financial services; Financial system regulation and policies; Payment clearing and settlement systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 C7 D83 E42 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain, nep-cba, nep-mon and nep-pay
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:25-35

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