For those of us that are regulars at fintech and artificial intelligence (AI) conferences and follow the development and innovation around AI, virtual financial assistants (VFAs) have gotten a lot of attention at these events for a few years now. But lately it seems that VFAs might be becoming old news -- conferences have started moving onto other topics after focusing on conversational AI for several years in a row. So the questions many people have are: "What's taking so long? Why doesn't my bank have one yet?" The hype around VFAs and their benefits the last few years may seem new but it is not, it just got louder.

UBS is a Swiss multinational investment banking and financial services company ranked 30th on S&P Global's list of the top 100 banks. In addition to investment banking and wealth management, the company is looking to improve its tech stack through several AI projects. We begin our coverage of UBS' AI initiatives with their project for a virtual financial assistant for their banking clients. UBS partnered with IBM and Digital Humans (formerly FaceMe) to create a virtual financial assistant for its customers. The virtual assistant is a conversational interface built with IBM's Watson Natural Language Understanding solution.

Financial technology, shortly termed as Fintech, has been on the rise since recent years. At its core, Fintech's main objectives are to help financial institutions, business owners and companies to better manage their financial operations and processes. Fintech incorporates the use of algorithms and software to make the lives of the consumers easy. Fintech has seen a lot of growth in the last decade and one of the latest growth is the use of virtual assistants for mobile banking. Erica is an AI-driven virtual financial assistant at Bank of America.