RBC Taps Salesforce and Others for Broker, Wealth Custody Platform

​RBC Clearing & Custody, Royal Bank of Canada’s newly-rebranded Correspondent and Advisor Services division, is building a new investment platform for servicing broker-dealer and registered investment advisor (RIA) clients. As part of an ongoing technology refresh to support a major growth spurt, the platform will use an open API architecture and a backbone based on Salesforce.

The technology changes being introduced stem from a decision originally taken around three years ago to improve the division’s infrastructure to drive growth for the unit, which provides custody and clearing services to institutions, financial technology providers, and insurers, among others, though its main client base is comprised of brokerages and wealth management firms.

“The business was originally seen as an add-on—a leveraged play for the rest of the business,” says Brett Thorne, head of RBC Clearing and Custody. “When I moved into this role four years ago, and Michael Armstrong came on board as CEO of the US wealth management business, we rethought this business, decided to grow it, and looked at our technology. It was OK, but needed to be refreshed. It had a lot of capabilities, but was maybe a little outdated, and we needed to expand our infrastructure.”

Initially, the firm launched a new platform, RBC Black, which was developed with wealth management vendor CircleBlack. The platform provides account aggregation and client engagement features, as well as client and portfolio risk alignment and portfolio rebalancing trading features from Riskalyze, in addition to financial planning tools from MoneyGuidePro, and CRM capabilities from Redtail. Part of the firm’s growth over that period—revenues and AUM are both up more than 100% over the last five years, according to the bank—can be attributed to the popularity of that platform, Thorne says.

As RBC Black demonstrates, the firm prefers to buy and integrate best-of-breed solutions.

For this new investment platform, which focuses on different client needs than RBC Black, the bank is using Salesforce Communities, a tool that allows users to split up data from their own Salesforce instances and make that data available to specific “communities” of clients. It will also incorporate Salesforce-owned Mulesoft as an integration platform for providing access to proprietary and third-party services that clients want available via their core advisor platform. Additionally, Deloitte is a partner in the project, working closely with the firm around technology strategy.

Thorne says this new platform—which will be available as a beta version in Q1 2021, before RBC releases the finished version in Q4 of next year or early 2022—will deliver easier navigation and more robust integration capabilities than the firm has offered in the past, according to Thorne.

“We prefer not to develop in-house, because we want to leverage the best technologies out there and integrate them into our client experiences,” he says, adding that the open API model enhances this approach, making it easier for clients to access their existing third-party services if they switch their custodial relationship to RBC. “Some of the technology and capabilities out there today are fabulous and very affordable. A lot of RIAs use a specific technology platform, and want to continue using that if they change their custodian, so this makes it easier for them to do that.”

New features planned to be part of the platform include a performance reporting module from wealth management and data aggregation and analytics provider Addepar. It will also incorporate digital account opening and onboarding capabilities from Docupace, a provider of document automation solutions for wealth managers, back offices, and operations, which RBC will initially deploy on a standalone basis before integrating into the Salesforce-based platform.

It will also include a new order entry component based on technology originally bought from Beta Systems by Dain Bosworth (now part of RBC) and developed in-house over many years. “So it’s more of a home-grown app. It has great functionality, and we like its capabilities, but looks a bit dated, so we’ll give it a refresh, and take the opportunity to add some extra capabilities, such as portfolio trading … and other things that we offer today in other solutions and want to integrate into that multi-asset-class order-entry platform,” Thorne says.

RBC decided to use Salesforce as the backbone after rolling out the vendor’s CRM platform to its US-based advisors, Thorne says. “Through that process, we were aware of this capability, but as we developed a closer working relationship with Salesforce and Deloitte … we became more familiar with the technology and how we could use it in this space, so we just took it from there.”