A Virtual Customer Assistant for the Wealth Management domain in the UWMP project Andrea Iovine Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy andrea.iovine@uniba.it Marco de Gemmis Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy marco.degemmis@uniba.it Fedelucio Narducci Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy fedelucio.narducci@uniba.it Giovanni Semeraro Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy giovanni.semeraro@uniba.it Doriana Filisetti Objectway SpA, Milan, Italy doriana.flisetti@objectway.com Davide Ingoglia Objectway SpA, Milan, Italy davide.ingoglia@objectway.com Georgios Lekkas Objectway SpA, Milan, Italy georgios.lekkas@objectway.com ABSTRACT The Universal Wealth Management Platform (UWMP) project has the objective of creating a new service model in the f- nancial domain. An integral part of this service model is the creation of a new Virtual Customer Assistant, that is able to assist customers via natural language dialogues. This paper is a report of the activities performed to develop this assistant. It illustrates a general architecture of the system, and describes the most important decisions made for its im- plementation. It also describes the main fnancial operations that it is able to assist customers with. Finally, it delineates some avenues for future work. CCS CONCEPTS · Human-centered computing → Natural language in- terfaces; · Computing methodologies → Information ex- traction; Discourse, dialogue and pragmatics. KEYWORDS Conversational Agents, Digital Assistants, Finance, Wealth Management ACM Reference Format: Andrea Iovine, Marco de Gemmis, Fedelucio Narducci, Giovanni Semeraro, Doriana Filisetti, Davide Ingoglia, and Georgios Lekkas. 2020. A Virtual Customer Assistant for the Wealth Management Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). domain in the UWMP project. In IUI ’20 Workshops, March 17, 2020, Cagliari, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. 1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND The purpose of Wealth Management frms is to advise clients on investment strategies, execute orders on their behalf and help them custody their fnancial assets. This type of work has always been closely associated to personal relationships and confdentiality. Today however, we expect that the com- ing of age of a new, digital-savvy generation of wealthy individuals will change the relations between clients and wealth management frms. Digital Assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri have popularized the notion of software applications helping users with everyday tasks. In the realm of business, such applications are also known as Virtual Customer Assistants and they support text or voice interactions to deliver infor- mation or to act on behalf of the customer. The goal of a Virtual Customer Assistant is twofold: frst, to take over rou- tine interactions so that human service agents can engage in more value-adding activities; second, to improve customer experience by reducing friction, i.e. eliminating any factor that can deter or slow down interactions between clients and frm. There are more than 200 software companies ofering Digital Assistants for customer interaction. In the fnancial domain some prominent cases are IBM Watson, Microsoft Virtual Assistant, boost.ai, Creative Virtual. Most of these assistants interact via the bank’s mobile app and web site, while a few in the USA use Facebook Messenger. For example, Royal Bank of Canada has a chatbot called Arbie that helps users open a new account. Bank of Amer- ica’s assistant called Erica [1] interacts with customers using voice and text messages. Wells Fargo’s chatbot [10] provides