Empowering RBC clients with a transformed digital experience

In consumer banking, adapting to customers’ ever-changing demands requires staffing flexibility, technical efficiency, and a digital-first mindset. To stay competitive, RBC Wealth Management—a U.S.- based subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada—sought out a flexible, long-term partner to support its platform of online portfolio management tools.

Around 2018, RBC Wealth Management began a broad technology transformation initiative, which included remodeling its technical platforms and overhauling its client experience. It had made improvements and enhancements to its secure web platform but hadn’t touched the core technology or underlying designs and paradigms in over a decade. RBC Wealth Management knew it wasn’t looking for a one-and-done solution, but rather an ongoing partnership to support a continually evolving platform.

Our collaboration with RBC Wealth Management began with our design team building initial concepts around its web platform goals, fleshing out UX design practices, and system designs within the tools and applications. RBC Wealth Management’s in-house teams began work on development, but the company soon realized it needed to increase the pace and throughput in order to realize the promise of its digital transformation.

The client launched a full request for proposals (RFP) process, ultimately choosing our team out of several vendors. Our design and development expertise and our ability to overlap onshore and offshore scheduling provided RBC Wealth Management with a partnership model that allows flexibility as its business needs grow and shift.

Our Agile design and development processes allowed RBC Wealth Management to build out and test designs with its clients to ensure they were directionally correct before going into development and production. Working through prototyping, modeling, and testing processes, we supported RBC Wealth Management every step of the way to deliver on its key themes for customers.

To build that partnership, we took the time to understand the company's business, processes, tactics, and rationale. We first and foremost focused on understanding, rather than overlaying new approaches onto RBC Wealth Management’s existing, mature processes. In doing so, we fostered mutual trust and innovative thinking to serve RBC Wealth Management’s clients better.

Working in a culture of shared mission and vision also helps us deliver great results. The tight integration of the teams enables the development of consistently high-quality code. In transforming its secure web platform, we helped RBC Wealth Management meet its goals to empower, engage, and enlighten its clients, and drive broader strategic priorities that rely on the website.

Our team also brought a different perspective to RBC Wealth Management’s offerings. While financial services is an understandably cautious and conservative industry, we built trust with RBC Wealth Management through quality deliverables and innovative thinking. And we continue to extend our design work with RBC Wealth Management, not only in client digital services but in the company’s trading applications, as well.