We helped RBC Wealth Management form tightly integrated teams to transform its digital platforms flexibly while yielding a meaningful impact on its bottom line.
When RBC Wealth Management—a U.S.-based subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada—needed help with its secure web platform. The company sought out a flexible, long-term partner to support its platform of online portfolio management tools.
RBC Wealth Management sought a way to stay competitive in the consumer banking sector by transforming its digital experience and platforms.
In such a competitive industry, adapting to customers’ ever-changing demands requires staffing flexibility, technical efficiency, and a digital-first mindset.
Rather than provide RBC Wealth Management with, a one-and-done solution, we developed an ongoing partnership to support a continually evolving platform.
Around 2018, RBC Wealth Management began a broad technology transformation initiative, which included remodeling its technical platforms and overhauling its client experience. “We had made improvements and enhancements to our secure web platform, but hadn’t touched the core technology or underlying designs and paradigms in more than a decade,” says Gwen Jorgens, RBC Wealth Management’s Director of Client Digital Experience. The goal was to pivot against increasing competitive forces while growing and shifting with future customer needs and demands. RBC Wealth Management knew it wasn’t looking for a one-and-done solution, but rather an ongoing partnership to support a continually evolving platform.
Elevate Your User Experience
Consistent Experience Across Platforms
RBC Wealth Management’s work with MentorMate began with our design team, building initial concepts around its web platform goals, fleshing out UX design practices, and system designs within the tools and applications. RBC Wealth Management’s in-house teams began work on development, but the company soon realized it needed to increase the pace and throughput in order to realize the promise of its digital transformation. “We could see that our competitors were continuing to invest in this space and that we needed to do something differently,” says Jorgens.
RBC Wealth Management launched a full request for proposals (RFP) process, ultimately choosing MentorMate out of several vendors. MentorMate’s design and development expertise, and its ability to overlap onshore and offshore scheduling provide RBC Wealth Management with a partnership model that allows flexibility as its business needs grow and shift.
MentorMate very quickly became not only a key partner but an integral part of the team… We're one team with one mission.
Director of Client Digital Experience, RBC Wealth Management
Our Agile design and development processes allowed RBC Wealth Management to build out and test designs with clients to ensure they were directionally correct before going into development and production. Working through prototyping, modeling, and testing processes, MentorMate partnered with RBC Wealth Management every step of the way to deliver on its key themes for clients.
RBC Wealth Management brought two development teams from MentorMate onboard in the last year. More importantly, though, they managed to seamlessly integrate their internal and external teams. RBC Wealth Management was able to interview team members to ensure the best fit from the outset. celebrations among colleagues.
To build that partnership, MentorMate took the time to understand RBC Wealth Management’s business, processes, tactics, and rationale. We first and foremost focused on understanding, rather than overlaying new approaches onto RBC Wealth Management’s existing, mature processes. In doing so, we fostered mutual trust and innovative thinking to serve RBC Wealth Management’s clients better. Says Jorgens, “[MentorMate] was able to come to the table and respectfully discuss and challenge some of our thinking and approaches to get to the best possible answers.”
That’s critically important to our success. I’m looking at being in this for the long haul. To me, that’s what a partnership is.
Director for U.S. Digital Applications, RBC Wealth Management
Working in a culture of shared mission and vision also helps MentorMate deliver great results. The tight integration of the teams enables the development of consistently high-quality code. In transforming its secure web platform, MentorMate helped RBC Wealth Management meet its goals to empower, engage, and enlighten its clients, and drive broader strategic priorities that rely on the website.
MentorMate also brought a different perspective to RBC Wealth Management’s offerings. While financial services is an understandably cautious and conservative industry, we built trust with RBC Wealth Management through quality deliverables and innovative thinking. And we continue to extend our design work with RBC Wealth Management, not only in client digital services but in the company’s trading applications, as well.
Financial services is very much a relationship-oriented industry. In that vein, RBC Wealth Management and MentorMate have laid the foundation for a strong, long-lasting partnership that can adapt to evolving customer expectations, continuous industry change, and increasing competitive pressure.