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RBC Royal Bank
Personal Deposit Account Paper Statements
New Approach Enhances Client Experience and Saves RBC Millions of Dollars
Background
The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), part of the RBC Financial Group, is Canada's largest bank as measured by market capitalization and assets. It provides personal and commercial banking, wealth management services, insurance, corporate and investment banking, and transaction-processing services on a global basis. The company's 70,000 full- and part-time employees serve more than 14 million personal, business and public-sector clients through offices in North America and 30 countries around the world.
Challenge
Until recently, RBC produced and mailed 147 million statements to the bank's personal-deposit account (PDA) customers every year. The inclusion of cancelled cheques in each statement added significantly to the admninistrative burden. Customers with more than one account received multiple, separate mailings. This not only added to the cost and complexity of the bank's processes, but also caused inconvenience to customers who needed to review several statements to get a complete picture of their personal banking activity.
The bank needed to find a new approach to providing statements to PDA customers that would improve operational efficiency and reduce monthly operating costs, while supporting the bank's strategy of "always earning the right to be our client's first choice."
Solution
RBC developed a new information technology infrastructure that enables the bank to offer new statement delivery options that better meet customer needs for tracking their financial information, while improving operational efficiency and cutting costs.
The new approach, which gives customers greater flexibility in selecting their PDA statement preferences, includes the following highlights:
- Statements are provided in a new, easier-to-read format that minimizes the use of acronyms and makes use of full transaction descriptions - in either English or French.
- Clients can choose whether to continue getting paper statements or get electronic statements through e-banking. They can also choose whether to have multiple account statements consolidated on to a single statement.
- Cancelled cheques are no longer returned with PDA statements. Clients can choose, however, to have paper images of the cheques included as part of their statements; or in the case of clients that have chosen to view statements online, electronic images of cancelled cheques are immediately made visible by clicking on a corresponding line item in the electronic statement.
- Through an "electronic filing cabinet" capability, clients can store images of statements and cheques in an electronic archive for up to seven years.
This PDA Paper Statement project was developed under RBC's eBusiness Architecture Program, an architecture composed of distinct tiers - data, applications anc clients - and permits isolation of the business logic from database components and the presentation layer. The design follows the principles of a service-oriented architecture, which implements its business logic in the form of independent, reusable services running in a distributed environment.
Results
Benefits from this project include enhanced client communications and customer service, improved operational efficiency and reduced cost; increased revenue; and new service and application development efficiencies.
Not only does the new format and use of plain language text make statements easier for clients to read, greater flexibility in choosing statement presentation options makes it easier for clients to track their financial information. The number of clients who have chosen to turn off their paper statements in favor of online statements, for example, is five times greater than was expected.
The number of monthly mailings has already been reduced by 600,000, cutting back on the amount of paper being consumed by 1.8 million pages a month and reducing the amount of money spent by the bank on third-party statement production services by 16 per cent.
The new statement program has also created a new revenue stream for the bank - clients that choose to have printed images of their cancelled cheques included with their paper statement are charged a nominal fee if they don't have a special account pricing package. This is expected to generate $3 million yearly for the bank. Overall, the new PDA statement process has resulted in annual cost savings in excess of $10 million.
Innovative Use of Technology
The PDA Paper Statement project led to the establishment of a new Client-Reporting Centre of Excellence and the introduction of new development and testing solutions that are being used by subsequent RBC client-reporting projects.
As a benchmark for a number of other RBC e-banking initiatives, this project delivered reusable architecture that will minimize future project implementation time. A new testing strategy, based on extensive test data and test case preparation, and multiple, overlapping test streams, enabled this project to achieve the earliest possible delivery schedule - without compromising quality - while reducing the staff (by 75 per cent) and cost (by 85 per cent) usually required for testing.
A 2006 CIPA Winner!
For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems, RBC Royal Bank has been awarded a 2006 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Efficiency and Operational Improvements, For Profit category.
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