**2. From "bricks" to "clicks"**

To begin with, it must be accounted for the significant improvements in information technology that have been translated into new means of making banking and financial services available, including delivering them electronically: no surprise that e-finance has increasingly expanded, at a relatively fast pace, as financial institutions have quickly perceived the risk of becoming obsolete if this evolving trend would not be endorsed; a case in point has to do with the automated teller machine (ATM), that stands as a major form of an e-banking facility and that has enabled customers to get cash, make deposits, transfer funds from one account to another and perform other financial transactions all day long, without interacting with a human being. Not only the adoption of this facility has contributed to keep operating costs at relatively modest levels for banks, but more convenience has been provided to their customers.

Meanwhile, the drop in the cost of telecommunications has encouraged these financial intermediaries to develop other innovations, such as those that fall under the umbrella of home banking: it allows banks' customers to conduct many of their bank transactions without even leaving the comfort of home; in turn, banks have reaped benefits that stem from bearing substantially lower transaction costs compared to those implied by having customers come to their premises. The success of ATMs has been acting as a catalyst for the introduction and spread of other innovative facilities, including the automated banking machine, which can be described as a combination in one location of an ATM, an Internet connection to the bank's website and a telephone link to customer service [5], p. 500.

#### *AI-Powered Virtual Assistants in the Realms of Banking and Financial Services DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95813*

Further innovations in the financial industry – and notably in the home banking area – have been stimulated by the decline in the price of personal computers and the increase in their presence in households, thus laying the foundations for the virtual bank (also called digital-only and online-only bank) as a new type of banking institution: it delivers its services through the Internet or other forms of electronic channels – instead of conventional branches – and merely exists in cyberspace, which takes home banking one step further by enabling customers to have a full set of banking services available at home 24 hours a day; accordingly, the need for a physical location as the main vehicle to handle financial transactions has started to fade away – up to the point that many actual and potential bank customers do not even feel this need any more – and "clicks" have begun to replace "bricks" thanks to this evolutionary business model in the banking industry. However, pure Internet banks can hardly be conceived as the wave of the future, with a combination of "clicks" and "bricks" being expected to establish itself as the predominant format in the banking sector, whereby remote banking can usefully complement the banking services provided in line with traditional standards.
