RBC Wealth Management onboards customers in 24 minutes

Challenge

Delivering a world-class customer experience

Founded in 1909, RBC Wealth Management, which operates as a division of RBC Capital Markets, has $528 billion in total client assets with more than 2,100 financial advisors operating in 181 locations in 42 states across the US.

Because best-in-class customer experiences are now the new battleground for financial services firms, in order to remain competitive RBC had to further embrace digital and provide customers and advisors with a seamless wealth management experience.

However, achieving these goals proved difficult. RBC not only needed to unlock critical customer and financial data in siloed legacy systems, but also integrate that data with modern cloud and on-premises applications across the organization for a single customer view. 

Objectives

Integrating siloed data to build a single view of the customer

For RBC, delivering a best-in-class customer experience required:

• Automating and connecting siloed legacy systems to digitize paper-based onboarding processes
• Building a single customer view and improving financial advisor productivity by integrating legacy data with cloud and on-premise systems
• Launching a client service portal that streamlines the customer experience

Solution

Accelerating legacy modernization with an API-first integration strategy

Digitizing the onboarding process

One of the first initiatives that RBC embarked on with MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ is automating and digitizing the paper- and mail-based processes for opening a bank account.

"Our #1 priority is to meet customers where they are and deliver world-class wealth management services. For us, this meant we needed to enhance our client and advisor experiences by moving away from inefficient and manual paper-based, mail-based, and fax-based onboarding processes," said Greg Beltzer, Head of Technology, RBC Wealth Management.

Previously, this weeks-long process involved RBC advisors putting together 200-300 page bundles of paperwork for customer onboarding with sticky notes that indicated to clients where they should sign to finalize opening the account.

To move away from manual processes, RBC needed to unlock data in siloed legacy systems. “Similar to other financial institutions, RBC has a lot of legacy technology. We can’t just rip and replace these systems, which is why we were looking for an integration platform that allows us to easily tap into critical legacy system data. MuleSoft checked every one of our boxes — from prebuilt integration capabilities to built-in security,” said Beltzer.

The RBC team turned to building reusable APIs — such as the Accounts API, Risk API, and Documents API — to unlock and integrate siloed data in LexisNexis, the bank’s client database, and other on-premises, legacy, and cloud systems.  With these APIs, the team was able to completely digitize the onboarding and account opening process.

Integrating key systems significantly improved the customer and service experience by reducing the need for manual data entry. Now, instead of putting together 200-300 page bundles of paperwork, customers can open a new account online with ease and advisors can monitor progress, verify identity, get signatures, and more — all in one interface.

Building a client service portal

After completely revamping the onboarding process, the RBC team turned to building a single view of their customers’ households via a client service portal.

Prior to MuleSoft, the RBC team was using an alternative API gateway vendor for their back-end systems. But they knew that for this project and in the long-run, an API gateway is not enough. They needed a solution that provided them with capabilities for the full API lifecycle, out-of-the-box connectors, and the ability to reuse APIs across multiple projects in order to increase productivity and accelerate project speed.

“The IT team was very excited about using MuleSoft because they realized it will enable them to reuse existing APIs and integrations and prebuilt connectors to accelerate project speed and deliver on critical business initiatives,” said Beltzer.

With MuleSoft, RBC was able to do just that — quickly compose new experiences and services using existing building blocks. By reusing the Accounts API, Clients API, and Documents API from their onboarding project, they were able to connect Docupase, Fenergo, and Salesforce Financial Service Clouds, and other systems to build a single customer view.

The team first combined customer data from Financial Service Cloud with financial account data from Envestnet, MoneyGuidePro, and other systems of record.

They then used APIs to surface key financial information — such as account balances and transactions — to advisors via Financial Service Cloud and to customers via the bank’s mobile and web-based client service portal.

Integrating all of these systems significantly improved productivity by enabling financial advisors to update client information and respond to client requests. Additionally, customers can now access their banking information in real-time anytime, anywhere — whether through mobile or desktop.

Results

Onboarding new customers in just 24 minutes

With MuleSoft, RBC was able to tap into critical data in legacy systems and build solutions to eliminate paper-based processes and cumbersome manual data entry.

Additionally, because the RBC team simplified access to back-end systems via APIs, they now spend 50% less resources on maintenance costs. The RBC team was also able to create and maintain reusable APIs to launch key digital initiatives, such as the client service portal, 3x faster than before.

“With MuleSoft by our side, we’re confident that the reusable APIs we built will be critical in enabling us to maximize our legacy investments and launch future customer innovations faster than ever before.”