Royal Bank of Canada is slated to launch a personalized direct investment experience for customers on its mobile app in three weeks.

The bank’s new platform is designed for customers who direct their own investing, for example buying their own mutual funds or stocks, as opposed to guided interactions with wealth advisors. The success of similar platforms geared for young customers and small business customers has led to an uptick in mobile engagement, said Rami Thabet, vice president of digital products at RBC.

“The direct investing experience is a massive step gradient to the capability we have today,” Thabet said, noting the current direct investment platform on the app is outdated and lacks certain personalization capabilities.

The new experiences, or editions, are a part of RBC’s primary app as the bank wanted to avoid spinning up secondary apps to service the needs of particular demographics, Thabet said. For the new investment edition, RBC is incorporating successful features from the young adult and SMB app experiences, which launched in August 2019.

RBC’s approach to mobile apps diverges from the common trend of big banks launching stand-alone personal finance apps geared toward customer segments outside of their primary banking apps. JPMorgan’s millennial-friendly digital banking app Finn shut down one year after launching, and Wells Fargo’s digital-only brand, Greenhouse, has stalled on its road to a national rollout, initially slated for yearend 2019.

“Younger adults have a funny habit of growing up. And when they grow up, asking them to move on to a different app just did not seem to make a whole lot of sense, so we leaned into creating an app that was personalized, considering we bank most of our clients across multiple products,” Thabet explained.

This approach provides a framework for RBC to launch a variety of editions for specific customer segments, without the need to develop an entirely new app, and has led to increased engagement. For the young adult segment, the personalized experience has led to a 50% increase in average session time, Thabet said, noting these customers appear to be having more thoughtful interactions on the app.

The new editions of the RBC app curates specific features and services — which already exist on the app — based on customers’ needs and evolves as those needs change. In the case of young adult users, the app emphasizes financial literacy and P2P payments that connect with their social networks. As their financial lives become more complex, the app adapts to accommodate the added banking functions and accounts.

“What’s interesting is, insights and nudges are universal — whether you’re looking at your credit card debt or investing or your mortgage, you’d like the bank to expose interesting and meaningful insights you can take action on,” Thabet said. “You don’t want to pull out an Excel spreadsheet and do your own calculations for things we already have, so we’ve also believed in doing the hard work and crunching the math and exposing the meaningful insights.”

Other features RBC will incorporate into the new investment edition from previous ones will be automatically filled-out value fields, or providing input for value fields, to make the experience as streamlined as possible. It will also enable customers to toggle back and forth between the investment banking platform other banking needs like day-to-day banking, credit cards and small business accounts.

“When you move into the direct invest experience, really the entire app moves around you, it becomes the direct invest experience and you’re immersed in that,” Thabet said. “It balances the beauty of having one app that supports one relationship because the client has one bank. We support that one view, but then personalize those unique needs around their financing.”