The concept of a telebanking and teleshopping system described in this book was developed at the TeleCounter competence center, which was part of the research program on information management at the University of St. Gallen. The prototypically implemented solution is named TeleCounter. Its initial goal was to create a new generation of telebanking systems. One premise for the telebanking sector is that a contemporary solution must be multi-bank capable, bringing together all of its retail service providers "under one roof" from the customers' perspective. Furthermore, the range of electronically offered services must be as extensive as possible, as the success of a telebanking solution largely depends on the number of participating customers. For this reason, a purely telebanking solution was quickly discarded.