RBC Wealth Management Transformed Its Technology and Productivity with Salesforce

You can too!

Many wealth management companies understand the benefits of implementing digital technologies. The struggle is in taking a daunting project and making it manageable from a technological standpoint while also getting advisors to adopt the new digital tools and processes. This is where Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Wealth Management found itself. While a successful business, it was near the bottom of the wealth management industry from a technology standpoint. Fast forward and RBC Wealth Management has successfully upgraded its systems and processes to make its advisors more efficient and more productive. And it has a 90% engagement rate with the new tools. Read on to find out how the largest bank in Canada made it happen.

Achieve 90% Engagement with New Salesforce Tools

RBC Wealth Management has $825 billion in assets under its management. It has more than 4,800 financial consultants, advisors, private bankers, and trust officers who provide advice and wealth solutions to individuals, families, and institutions.

CONTEXT OF SALESFORCE NEEDS

Separate systems cause inefficiencies… Wealth management depends on relationships, leaders at RBC Wealth Management also know that the definition of “relationship” continues to morph in the digital world. While clearly successful, they knew the company’s technological limitations would risk its continued success in the long term. Both processes and systems were in need of an overhaul. They were using an aging customer relationship management (CRM) tool. They underinvested in the tool, and the vendor didn’t have a clear vision for it beyond a CRM.

Beyond outgrowing the platform, advisors had to access 26 systems to pull together the client data they needed to prepare for meetings or to onboard new clients. This obviously took a long time, and to make things worse, data wasn’t always in sync between the systems. Without the tools to be efficient or productive, advisors spent too much time with administrative tasks at the expense of bringing in new business and building their books.

Besides their own advisors being unhappy, they were losing out on recruits who loved the company and its culture but found the technology to not be competitive. Through surveys, leaders found that 25% of recruits accepted jobs at competitor companies solely due to the state of their digital technology.

RBC Wealth Management’s leaders knew they needed to transform their systems and processes and make their advisors’ lives easier.

Keys to improving their success and productivity included:

• Providing advisor desktops with the tools to grow their business
• Integrating their systems and pulling all customer data into one place
• Allowing advisors to prepare for client calls and meetings in less time with analytics and reporting capabilities that better served their clients’ needs

One of the main change catalysts was learning that 25% of recruits accepted jobs with competitors due to the state of the company’s digital technology. Leaders were having issues keeping and attracting advisors because of this tech.

SALESFORCE INTEGRATION CONSIDERATIONS

RBC Wealth Management decided early not to pursue a solution with its legacy providers. Its final decision came down to Salesforce and another provider. It went with Salesforce for a number of reasons and benefits. One big reason was because the company had experience using Salesforce with its help desk. It started with just one help desk and then expanded to all. With that foundation, its Salesforce contacts created a longer-term vision, proving it to be more than a CRM — rather a full platform that could take RBC Wealth Management where it wanted to ultimately go with its advisor desktop providing a single source of truth. They put together implementation steps to accomplish their vision.

Single Source: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud

A key piece of the solution is Financial Services Cloud. Financial Services Cloud is a purpose-built platform that unites client data from RBC Wealth Management’s current systems into a single source of truth to help advisors more easily manage their book of business. Financial Services Cloud’s ability to integrate with RBC Wealth Management’s key legacy systems allows advisors (and management) to access all customer information easily from their desktop. A seamless data exchange between Financial Services Cloud and the other systems also solves the problem of inconsistent data between systems.

Just as Important: Speed to Market

Speed to market was an important consideration as RBC Wealth Management was already behind with digital technology. Financial Services Cloud is an out-of-the-box solution with a very mature wealth component that allowed RBC Wealth Management to roll it out to advisors (and clients) faster.

Access to Reporting and Salesforce Analytics

Salesforce also offers back-end reporting benefits that RBC Wealth Management didn’t have with its current system. In fact, the legacy CRM didn’t have any reporting capabilities. With Salesforce, advisors can create and customize their own reports instantly instead of waiting days or weeks for canned reports. The number of spreadsheets used to manually keep track of their business was pervasive, onerous, outdated, and spread among multiple systems. With Salesforce, advisors can access analytics they never had before around their book of business — in near real time right on their desktop.

Compliance Solutions

Compliance to regulations requires a lot of documentation and transparency. Solutions for requirements, such as Client Best Interest, can be built right into Salesforce so advisors can seamlessly track for overdue work items. This also helps management provide improved transparency and immediacy with regulatory compliance.

GETTING IT DONE WITH SALESFORCE

Just adding new digital technology and tools wasn’t enough to make the right impact with RBC Wealth Management’s advisors. It also required changing processes that were developed based on the technology they were using at the time. These were manual and not efficient, with a lot of data entry. “You can’t just take something and make it digital. You have to look at and take advantage of processes to get full value,” said Greg Beltzer, Head of Technology, RBC Wealth Management. Management wanted to optimize their processes based on new possibilities with the technology to drive better and faster return on investment.

As a result, they dove heavily into change management to encourage buy-in with the company’s staff. They created an internal team (WealthX) to drive the changes. It also helped that they had full support from the executive team throughout the project. With a clear vision of what these changes meant for RBC Wealth Management, they provided visibility to all employees, as well as the resources needed to complete the transformation.

Part of the implementation included replacing the company’s client master, which required a significant amount of data scrubbing. Beltzer recommends this as a crucial step so that companies have extremely clean data for the new system. He said, “If you put bad data into a new platform, it’s still bad data.” This led to more comfort for advisors in using the new tools.

FOR COACHING AND TRAINING ADVISORS ON FINANCIAL SERVICES CLOUD, THEY FELL INTO TWO GROUPS.

Legacy advisors who had been there a long time needed a lot of coaching. The company involved its practice management group to coach them on how to apply the new processes, with the technology to run their books and get the most from their opportunities.

New advisors had experience with Salesforce from past firms. Their training was geared more to specific things they had done with those companies and how to apply them to RBC Wealth Management’s procedures.

SALESFORCE INTEGRATION RESULTS

A key result is that RBC Wealth Management is currently at a 90% adoption rate, which shows the value the advisors see in the digital capabilities. When you make things easy, it’s amazing what that does to adoption. And with advisors having a single source of truth, entering data into Salesforce also updates 90% of their systems for a huge time savings. Onboarding clients and opening new accounts used to take days or weeks, but now is accomplished in hours (or less).

Working with Salesforce, RBC Wealth Management launched the new tools in six months from the start of discovery, including the integrations with its legacy systems. RBC Wealth Management was also able to sunset a number of its systems to get the total down to single digits.

With access from their desktops, advisors like the ability to create their own reports. The desktops are populated with some basic templates to start with, and advisors can customize and sort the data to present it how they like. The integration pulls the data for them, and they can seamlessly move between applications.

Adding CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM) to Financial Services Cloud changed advisors’ view of the CRM as a tool to input data to a tool from which they can retrieve data. Based on the integrated client info, CRM Analytics uses artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend personalized offers for clients. Advisors now spend time on higher value-added opportunities with better chances of success.

Advisors can focus on servicing clients and building out business. No more scrambling to pull in client information on the fly. They can create and print out high-quality client information that focuses on important data for specific meetings, allowing advisors to put their energy into building better relationships with their clients instead of mundane administrative work. A key result is that RBC Wealth Management is currently at a 90% adoption rate, which shows the value the advisors see in the digital capabilities. Beltzer summed it up by saying, “When you make things easy, it’s amazing what that does to adoption.”

One of the biggest successes in the company’s transformation is the success it is now having with recruitment. And retention is also remarkably high. Even as the industry as a whole is seeing turnover, advisors are gladly staying with RBC Wealth Management. Once viewed as being near the bottom for technology in the industry, RBC Wealth Management is now considered a leading firm.

RBC Wealth Management continues to build on its Salesforce tools. Next up is Salesforce Community for its correspondent channel of independent dealers who use RBC Wealth Management for clearing and custody of their assets. It will give them enhanced capabilities over their current portal. Plus, all future non-Salesforce technology tools must have a Salesforce integration as a prerequisite in order to remove friction for advisors.

Wealth management is a relationship business. The definition of relationship in a digital world continues to change. The biggest evolution in wealth is in being able to establish relationships through different means, and that is threaded together differently than through your traditional in-person meetings or phone calls. Those who are successful will be those who are able to seamlessly meet customers’ needs through many channels and have the infrastructure to evolve with them. Learn about the next-gen tools for wealth management and how Salesforce can help you set up the right strategy for connecting with your clients like never before.