RBC Wealth Management, a division of RBC Capital Markets, LLC, provides trusted advice and wealth management solutions to individuals, families and institutions. More than 2,000 financial advisors in 180 locations in 42 states rely on technology to enable a world-class client experience.
Like many companies beginning a digital transformation journey, the wealth management division was facing a big challenge to piece together disparate systems. Its advisors, for example, had to access 26 systems to pull together the client data they needed to prepare for meetings with new clients.
The company was sitting on a wealth of client data, but it wasn’t able to use that data to provide the connected, personalised experiences that wealth management clients expect.
In an era of increasing competition from smaller, agile providers such as fintechs, RBC Wealth Management knew it had to give its teams the insights and tools they needed to provide superior experiences.
So, RBC Wealth Management turned to a team of the world’s leading Salesforce experts to help it consolidate its CRM systems and integrate data from other legacy systems into a unified platform purpose-built for wealth management.
Here are four lessons from RBC Wealth Management’s transformation you can use to give your employees a 360-degree view of every client, streamline processes to deliver personalised experiences, and empower your IT team to build and scale faster.
Our number one priority is to 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 processes
Greg BeltzerHead of Technology, RBC Wealth Management - U.S.
One of the main challenges for any large organisation is to provide clients with consistently outstanding experiences no matter who they're engaging with in the organisation. The solution is to unify every line of business onto one platform. But that’s easier said than done, particularly for an organisation with more than 2,000 advisors.
So, RBC Wealth Management not only standardised on one CRM system; it also chose a platform that’s tailored to the wealth management industry. With its purpose-built industry functionality, the platform accelerated RBC Wealth Management's time to value.
RBC Wealth Management also needed a way to bring in customer data from legacy systems, so it used industry-leading integration to connect third-party systems to the new platform. And because of the regulation and scrutiny on financial services firms, it used encryption and other security measures to protect clients’ personal and financial data.
As a result of these initiatives, RBC Wealth Management’s advisors can now provide trusted, personalised experiences for their clients.
“MuleSoft has been critical in enabling our IT team to bring our legacy technology and modern platforms together," said Greg Beltzer, Head of Technology, RBC Wealth Management - U.S. "We now have a single view of each and every customer.”
Rohit's ability to understand the nuances of the data - he's a master of it. I always love to give him the toughest problems because I just want to see how he's going to solve it.
Greg BeltzerHead of Technology, RBC Wealth Management - U.S.
The wealth management industry's traditional process-driven approach to business hasn’t always resulted in the best client experiences. Onboarding is a prime example when new clients typically receive a 100-page physical document with sticky notes indicating where to sign.
RBC Wealth Management wanted to remove that friction. So, using low-code automation, extending it with custom functionality➚, and pairing it with a customer-first digital experience, it was able to automate its case management workflows for a better client onboarding experience. As a result, onboarding time has been reduced from weeks to just 24 minutes on average.
With the new customer-first digital experience, RBC Wealth Management was able to create a new portal for clients that gives them full visibility of all their accounts. In addition, it gave them access to a financial advisor's analytics dashboard, allowing them to quickly view their portfolio and cases on their own time.
Underpinning many of its initiatives, RBC Wealth Management has been able to integrate its systems using application programming interfaces (APIs) to accelerate innovation. And, reducing the IT team's workload has resulted in a 50% drop in maintenance costs.
The scalability of the platform helps our admins and developers build the automations and tools that really help the advisors serve their clients’ needs.
Rohit GuptaDirector, RBC Wealth Management - U.S.
The next step after giving advisors a complete view of client data is to provide them with relevant, actionable insights they can use to create better client experiences. This is particularly important for advisors and managers because client expectations are rising steeply.
So, RBC Wealth Management added analytics and AI to its CRM platform. Managers and executives can now view employee and branch performance by portfolio value, revenue, and active campaigns. Advisors have easy access to the insights they need and, importantly, recommended actions to take. For example, they can see if they’re overdue to contact a priority client and then set in motion an automated workflow to schedule a meeting immediately.
This enhanced intelligence has delivered huge operational efficiencies. Advisors spend far less time dealing with internal processes and more time helping existing clients and growing the business.
Slack allows RBC's tech teams more agility in how they collaborate internally. For example, operations teams can swarm around unclear or difficult service issues for faster case resolution. Additionally, individual team members can use Slack's self-select function in channels and conversations to filter incoming information by relevance to their work.
RBC Wealth Management plans to round out its client-centric platform with an accessible digital marketing solution across the organization. This should enable its marketing teams to create powerful, personalized campaigns while also helping other teams. Each advisor, for example, will have a more complete view of their clients’ journeys and, as a result, can personalize conversations and build longer-lasting relationships.
To prepare for client meetings, advisors had to reference up to 26 different systems. It would take 3–4 hours to prepare for the meeting. Now, all the information advisors need is right there at the click of a button.
Greg BeltzerHead of Technology, RBC Wealth Management - U.S.
RBC Wealth Management’s investment in a client-first digital platform has equipped its wealth management advisors with the insights and tools they need to succeed. Additionally, RBC is able to attract new talent due to its innovative employee onboarding and workflow processes. RBC Wealth Management is a desirable place to work, which is particularly vital in the financial services sector, where advisors tend to change jobs regularly. And with a unified platform for open communication across teams, RBC continues to foster a culture of collaboration and transparency.
We surveyed advisors who did not come to RBC, and one in four said it was because of the legacy technology. That all changed when we moved to Salesforce.
Greg BeltzerHead of Technology, RBC Wealth Management - U.S.
Unifying teams on one platform also allows RBC Wealth Management to plan more strategically. For example, it is combining its strengths in the wealth management and capital markets to accelerate growth in the U.S. At an individual level, this gives financial advisors more opportunities to cross-sell, increasing their portfolios and the number of products per client.
Good people and good decision-making are vital to grow any business. By standardizing on a modern digital platform, RBC Wealth Management now benefits from both.
