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RBC Royal Bank
Client-Reporting - Centre of Excellence Program
A New Way of Communicating Transforms Canada's Biggest Bank
Challenge
The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), part of the RBC Financial Group, was not happy with its client communications. That was a big problem for Canada's largest bank, since it serves a great many clients -- more than 14 million personal, business and institutional clients through offices in North America and 34 countries around the world.
RBC clients had been receiving hardcopy statements via mail, and clients with more than one account or having mutliple RBC financial products received multiple, separate mailings. This was not only inconvenient for clients, but also was very expensive, costing RBC millions of dollars of dollars each year in paper, envelopes, postage and administrative effort. In addition, RBC client service representatives didn't have access to the same statements that clients were receiving.
Between the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2006, the bank implemented an initial project to offer clients electronic statements for their personal accounts instead of mailed statements. The Personal Deposit Account (PDA) Paper Statements project proved successful, saving RBC money and making it easier for clients to do business with the bank. It also began a transformation in RBC's entire communications and information-technology culture, achieved through collaboration.
Solution
RBC created the Client-Reporting - Centre of Excellence Program, which has brought together all of the departments that provide personal and commercial banking, wealth management services, insurance, corporate and investment banking to share a common communications vision and the technology that supports it.
Aligned with RBC's corporate vision, "Always earning the right to be our clients' first choice," the Client Reporting - Centre of Excellence Program was developed to "efficiently transform client communications to make it easier for clients to do business with RBC."
Within the program are a number of document delivery, electronic storage and marketing communications solutions, all integrated by RBC's eBusiness architecture. This service-oriented architecture is composed of distinct tiers - data, applications and clients - permitting isolation of the business logic from database components and the presentation layer. This means that independent technology components can be created, distributed and reused, reducing development costs and cutting the time to market for new client services.
The home of the Client Reporting - Centre of Excellence Program is the Centre of Excellence itself. Located in downtown Toronto since July 2006, this centre houses the people, processes and methodology that first came together in the PDA Paper Statements project and now are regarded as a best practice within RBC.
Whereas previously each product group within the bank carried out its own client-communication projects, using their own IT resources, now the Centre of Excellence centralizes subject-matter expertise related to electronic and paper client communications. It has supervised the implementation of electronic statement services for a variety of RBC products including Visa, Royal Credit Line, RBC Homeline and Marketing.
The new operating model also includes stronger collaboration with Symcor, RBC's joint-venture partner, which provides of cheque processing, payment processing, statement production and document management services. Symcor and RBC aligned their project-management methodologies through the Client Reporting - Centre of Excellence Program and now the Centre of Excellence employees of both.
Results
The benefits from this project are substantial. In addition to reducing the number of yearly statement mailings by 16 million, saving the company $8 million, RBC will gain approximately $5 million in additional revenue in 2007 from optional fee-based services derived from providing clients with the ability to suppress paper statements. In total, RBC has already realized $58 million in benefits to date, from a program forecast to yield $340 million in benefits overall.
Client service is significantly enhanced as well. In addition to making statements available to clients faster - five to seven days faster than by mail - the program makes it easier for RBC to resolve client inquiries by giving client-service staff access to exactly the same statement information that clients get.
Electronic statement and paper statement enhancement helped RBC reduce paper consumption by 20 tonnes in 2006, saving about 220 megawatt-hours of energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by five tonnes. In April 2007, RBC was ranked number 1 in the world, based on an analysis of 1,800 global companies in 16 countries published by Newsweek magazine, on how effectively it manages environmental risks and opportunities relative to industry peers.
Innovative Use of Technology
Designed exclusively for the program's electronic statement solution portfolio, RBC's Basic "e" design concept provides a common technology foundation for delivery channel, notification, preferences and view procedures. The use of this design concept in the development of all electronic statement products produces a consistent client experience across all those products. It has also reduced product design time - architects don't have to create new design elements for each new statement product - and ensures seamless, efficient product maintenance because it is common to all products.
From an application- and systems-development perspective, the Client-Reporting - Centre of Excellence Program uses new processes and methodologies that shorten the development cycle for client-oriented communications and reporting initiatives. New product development has been reduced from seven months for one product to nine months for two products, for example, enabling RBC and Symcor to take on additional projects.
A 2007 CIPA Winner!
For its excellent application of information technology to transform processes and bring benefits to its stakeholders, RBC Royal Bank has been awarded a 2007 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Collaboration, For Profit category.
Technology partners
Symcor Inc.
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