RBC Business Banking

Background & Overview

RBC, the largest and one of the oldest banks in Canada, is at risk of losing business banking market share to competition.

Royal Bank of Canada is a Canadian multinational financial services company and the largest bank in Canada by market capitalization. The bank serves over 17 million clients and has more than 89,000 employees worldwide

Aggressive competition in the business banking space has been eroding the value of basic banking products such as chequing and savings accounts. To win, RBC has made a strategic decision to reposition from product-focused selling to offering simpler value-added solutions and advanced data services.

My Role & What I Did

Senior Interaction Designer.

RBC has a mature design practice. As a result, each product team is assigned multiple designers with various specialties. I worked closely with a visual designer and a content designer, along with the larger engineering squad and our business partners. I was responsible for:

Stakeholder interviews
User research
Information architecture
Interaction design
Rapid prototyping
Documenting patterns, annotations, and best practices

Main Challenge

Forecasted losses of CAD$450MM pushed us to envision a new business banking experience.

It was estimated that CAD$450MM of business banking revenue over the next 5 years is at risk.

This would be driven primarily by increased competition, access to different ways of payment, lack of integrated offering, and inability to attach remittance data.

Currently, business banking clients have to use two separate portals conduct their business:

RBC Online Business Banking

Pay vendors and employees
Transfer funds between accounts
File government remittances

RBC Express

View balances and transactions
Approve transactions made by others
Release approved transactions
Other basic banking functions

Product North Star

Provide value-added solutions and advanced data services to clients.

The goal is to redefine the business banking client experience by moving away from product-focused selling to offering simpler value-added solutions and advanced data services.

For the payments stream of the new portal, leveraging a new proprietary payments engine as a building block would be our main focus.

Rethinking the Back-end

RBC acquires WayPay, a fintech startup focused on automation of payables.

In 2019, RBC acquired an accounts payable automation fintech company called WayPay. Eventually rebranded as RBC PayEdge, the vision for the platform would serve two purposes:

Leveraging the proprietary payments engine as a building block for a new generation of business banking.
Value-added selling to existing customers.

Introducing “Payment Order”

A payment order is a way to create a payment request that combines different disbursement types and different funding sources. A practical example would be an e-commerce shopping cart, where a client collects items and pays for them.

The difference in the case of a payment order is instead of purchasing goods, the client builds their “cart” with outgoing payments. Once collected, the order can be funded from multiple sources such as bank accounts, credit cards, etc.

As part of my regular role, I was frequently called upon to simplify and promote the benefits of the payment order concept.

User Research

29 in-depth interviews. 200+ survey comments. I analyzed this data to fully understand client needs and goals.

We held a total of 29 one-hour in-depth interviews with Principals or Finance Managers within small to medium sized businesses ($1MM to $80MM in annual revenues). We also analyzed over 200 comments from a survey of clients currently using RBC Express.

As a larger business banking design team, we collaborated to create a breakdown of jobs-to-be-done based on existing clients, their tasks, and their pain points. We steered away from behavioural and arbitrary attributes to hone in on the specific problems our users experience.

Image of different types of clients who work with payments

Initial research showed that clients are looking to make their payments and approvals process more streamlined. In a typical scenario, an accounts payable clerk would gather all payments that need to be paid by wire transfer, reconcile the entries, and submit for approval to a senior member of their organization.

The same process is to be repeated for other payment methods such as credit card payments, ACH payments, cheques, and others.

Research Synthesis

Clients want streamlined ways to pay their suppliers and employees.

There is a fundamental desire to move away from focusing on payment methods. Ideal workflow for all payment methods should be the same and disbursement types should be broken apart from the funding source.

Project Scope

“Thin slice” solution to kick-start client migration from primary legacy system.

The business banking payments ecosystem is big. Really big. For RBC to get a head start in the market, we needed to release an MVP (a walking skeleton, as we lovingly referred to our project). The walking skeleton allowed us to gradually start onboarding a small amount of existing clients by migrating them from RBC Express, our legacy system. This slow approach would be closely monitored and allow us to collect feedback from actual users of the product. At any point in time, the users can switch back to RBC Express.

For the few initial releases, we would focus on the following features:

1. Make a transfer between two existing accounts

User flow showing how to make a transfer between two existing accounts

2. Add a payee to send money to

User flow showing how to add a payee to send money to

3. Make a payment to one or more payees in one go

User flow showing how to make a payment to one or more payees in one go

Prototyping & Testing

How are doers and decision-makers impacted by an approvals proccess and how do they manage existing payments?

We tested many aspects of the payments portal. Clients were tasked with going through the basics such as transferring funds, adding payees, and making a single payment to more complex functions that are unique to each client and their internal processes, such as limits and approvals.

I created several prototypes (branded and white-labelled) to test with existing clients and those who do not currently bank with RBC.

Client Feedback

Clients ultimately want one-line items to represent a payment order, with the ability to “dig deeper” and to see individual transactions.

“

It would be great if there was a drill down function [ ... ] currently, I have to go to my finance team and say – ‘you paid $356K on this day, what is it made of?’ I could learn that it was made up of 3 payments to 3 different vendors. Say the payment happened two weeks ago, it’s a manual thing where the team has to dig it up.

- Owner
Restaurant Chain, $1-5MM

”

“

I would like to be able to save a PDF version of individual Payments made by ACH. You currently allow us to save the whole payment. but I want individual receipts for each payment.

- Accountant
Roofing Company, $10-30MM

”

There was also a perception that the client’s accounting system should host all these details, and bank transactions should be represented as a “lump sum”.

This was identified as another opportunity for data sharing between banking and accounting systems, where clients can easily “click to see more details”.

Visual Design & Content

My push to humanize the language tested positively with clients and stakeholders. It created a snowball effect to promote a new style of content design across the whole business banking ecosystem.

As our discovery and research moved along, we also began thinking about visual design that would allow our engineering team to start building and testing new features. With a robust design system at our disposal we took an opportunity to elevate some visual aspects to create a more delightful and personalized experience.

Working closely with my content design partner, I also advocated for a conversational, informal style of content to avoid sounding overly rigid. When a client was creating an initial payment order, we eschewed words like “From” and “To” by replacing them with terms like “Where the money is going” and “Where the money is coming from.”

Results & Impact

2,500+ high-value clients were successfully migrated to the new platform.

As part of a phased-in approach in February 2021, we onboarded an initial cohort of 9 clients who agreed to take part in the pilot. Clients were capped at CAD$5,000 per transaction.

By July 2021, approximately 2,500 clients were transferred to the new platform without transactional limits increased to match their existing profiles. Here is what some of them had to say:

“

It's pretty clean, streamlined […] There were a few things I really liked, like being able to look at my transactions by simply clicking on the account, and that I could easily view my statements and download multiple - I can't even explain how wowed I was on that one.

- Co-owner
Franchisee, $5-10MM

”

“

I'm so excited about this pilot because I feel like RBC has addressed my concerns with RBC Express for [our] banking needs. I do feel like [the new platform] will be no problem, and I'm going to migrate the handful of things that I still do in our [competitor bank] account over to this platform to integrate it and be 100% RBC because it's so much simpler.

- Controller
Industrial Services, $10-15MM

”

RBC Business Banking - Payments

New business banking experience that scales with RBC’s clients and provides timely, relevant, and actionable financial insights to help manage their business.

February 2020 - September 2021