RBC Clear, the corporate cash and treasury management platform of the $1.5 trillion RBC, is leveraging technology to meet the needs of corporate clients.

The platform, developed under the RBC Capital Markets arm, launched in April 2024  to provide cash management to Fortune 1,000 corporations in the U.S. 

Fast-moving markets — and businesses struggling to keep pace with them — give RBC an opportunity to serve the largest corporations through this platform, Kartik Kaushik, managing director and head of RBC Clear, told Bank Automation News. 

“I think one challenge that corporate treasurers may encounter is navigating interest rates during periods of higher volatility,” Kaushik said. “Interest rate changes can significantly affect their cost of borrowing, which in turn can affect their ability to manage cash flow.” 

Making the right investment decisions and  choosing appropriate technology solutions can offer corporate clients full visibility of cash positions across global operations so treasurers can manage their liquidity no matter the rate environment, Kaushik said. 

BAN caught up with Kaushik to discuss the challenges and opportunities RBC Clear faces. What follows is an edited version of the conversation. 

Bank Automation News: What are the key technological innovations that RBC Clear has implemented under your leadership? 

Kartik Kaushik: RBC Clear has created a digital-first cash management solution that puts clients in control of their working capital. Our vision was shaped by the extensive time we spent talking with treasurers and their teams to define their end-to-end workflows, identify critical pain points and highlight areas where data or other enabling information could help save them time and guesswork.  

We evaluated RBC’s technology infrastructure, including payment and core systems. Although none of the pre-existing systems could fully support our reimagined offering, there were innovative, next-gen components that we utilized as foundational elements for our new platform.  

Ultimately, we built from a blank slate, leveraging RBC’s existing components where it made sense, enlisting leading technology vendors when that made sense, and building much of the differentiating technology in-house. We invested in cloud-native, API-first, next-gen technologies. And we redesigned process flows to free them of the analog systems-thinking that holds back other banks. 

Our intelligent workflows, deployed on hybrid cloud architecture and infused with data and hyper-automation, are all deployed in the interest of solving common industry pain points. 

• Onboarding: Traditional processes are manual and complex and can take 60-plus days. We have streamlined the process to make it easier and faster for clients, with some clients able to onboard in a single day. 

• Lengthy and expensive integrations: We heard frustrations about how long and resource-intensive it can be for clients to connect their TMS or ERP system to their bank. We have reimagined connectivity set-up so that, with some upfront preparation by clients, connectivity can be completed in as fast as one-to-two days. 

• Transparency in payments: When we talked to clients, they reported having limited visibility into inflight payments and needing to frequently call their bank to find out what happened to their payment. Our system offers near-real-time visibility into payment status, greatly reducing the need for these phone calls. 

BAN: How do you ensure that RBC Clear stays ahead of technological trends in the financial industry? 

KK: Our emphasis on building for and with corporate treasurers, essentially emulating the crowdsourcing model that is often seen in the consumer world, means that the voice of the customer is a cornerstone of our business. By continuously listening to and checking in with our customers regarding their pain points, needs, wins, and industry observations, we are able to stay ahead of financial industry trends. 

Our solution is built for the future. Our competitors all have strong offerings, and they all stay abreast of technological trends, but the fact is, many of them are working with systems that are decades old, and it’s challenging to update a 30-year-old system holistically. We built an agile chassis from the beginning, with every component designed to be omni-channel, with an API-first mindset.

BAN: What were the most significant milestones in the growth of RBC Clear?   

KK: We’ve had some exciting wins since our inception, starting with onboarding our first client back in 2023. We launched first with an internal client. This gave us the confidence to scale, so we proceeded to onboard a select group of external beta clients. A huge success for us was when one of those clients — a top 10 U.S. retailer — successfully onboarded onto our platform in a single day.  This compares to the typical industry onboarding time of up to 60 days. Successes like that with our beta clients got us the approval to launch our brand and open for more clients a few months later. 

We onboarded our 100th client less than a year after our official launch, well ahead of where we thought we’d be at this point. We also hit $9 billion in deposits. 

BAN: How has RBC Clear adapted to the changing needs of corporate treasury clients?  

KK: This started with our decision to build a future-state platform anew rather than attempt to retrofit something we already had.   

The decision to build from scratch became our underpinning philosophy: Don’t just reengineer — reimagine. From our extensive client-advisory sessions, we learned that corporate treasurers are bogged down by issues like manual and complex onboarding, lack of payment visibility, and generic ACH processes. 

All of these pain points mean that treasurers are busy with tedious tasks that take up their time. We came to envision a new way in which every one of those hours is spent on high-value activities and not on chasing their bank. We sought to alleviate these pain points with an emphasis on traceability and transparency, prioritizing cloud enablement to enable agility and scalability and omni-channel servicing with an API-first mindset. 

BAN: What are the biggest opportunities you see in the corporate treasury space? 

KK: The highly regulated corporate treasury space has traditionally been serviced by Tier 1 banks reliant on legacy systems. And while we’re seeing more innovation in this space, there are still many areas of opportunity that are ripe for disruption. One that I’d like to call out is the onboarding process. 

During conversations with corporate treasurers, they told the RBC Clear team that simple tasks like opening new accounts took an average of 45 days, that they weren’t able to see the state of their money in real time, and that there was no K in their “KYC.” They lamented that their banks never seem to remember who they are, and that they are often required to resubmit documentation that is already on file in some other part of the bank. 

Issues like this  — pain points that seemed unnecessary — were pervasive in the treasury space. We built RBC Clear to tackle other issues like this that have stymied treasurers for far too long, and instead help them gain true operational efficiency.