RBC Royal Bank: Asset-Based Lending Division Creates Secure Reporting Portal for Customers
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- Canada
Product
- WebFOCUS
Tech Stack
- Microsoft Windows NT server operating system
- Microsoft SQL Server database
- Microsoft Windows 2003
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Replenishment
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
RBC Royal Bank is Canada’s largest bank as measured by assets, and one of North America’s leading diversified financial services companies. The bank has a reputation as a technology innovator since the early 1960s when it became the first bank in Canada to install a computer. The company has stayed ahead of the technology curve ever since, often bolstered by its dependence on business intelligence, enterprise reporting, and integration technology from Information Builders and its sister company, iWay Software. RBC is one of Canada’s pioneers in asset-based lending, a flexible way of providing fast-growing or highly leveraged companies with working capital. The lending institution approves revolving lines of credit primarily secured by accounts receivable and inventory.
The Challenge
RBC Royal Bank, Canada’s largest bank, needed to provide real-time loan status information to its asset-based lending (ABL) customers. The major difference between asset-based lending and traditional commercial lending is control. The asset-based lending group at RBC focuses its due diligence on understanding the makeup and status of the borrower’s collateral so the bank can maximize the borrower’s margin availability based on the underlying value of its current assets, accounts receivable, and inventory. This involves a daily or weekly analysis, the results of which must be available to lending managers and customers at all times. Several major software vendors provide ABL solutions that perform these calculations. However, while the ABL application RBC uses has a Web-based reporting interface for this purpose, IT professionals at the bank were reluctant to use it because of concerns about security. In order to use the vendor’s solution, critical customer data – which RBC always keeps behind its firewall – would have to be copied to the vendor’s servers, opening up the possibility for substantial confidentiality risks.
The Solution
RBC decided to devise a secure reporting solution that allows authorized users to easily obtain standard reports from servers located behind RBC’s firewall. The bank chose WebFOCUS because of its server-based architecture, which allows the entire reporting infrastructure to be deployed and managed behind RBC’s firewall. Additionally, RBC had lots of experience using WebFOCUS and iWay in demanding production environments. Two popular applications currently being used at the bank include Bankbook Reconstruct, a customer-facing application that creates bank statements from seven years of transactions in a data warehouse, and Merchant Direct, an online reporting service that allows merchants to view daily sales data from bankcard transactions. Both applications have proven the potential of Information Builders’ software for creating highly scalable, highly reliable self-service reporting systems. Roberto Noe, a project manager within RBC’s Enterprise Reporting Solutions Group, helped develop a secure link to the Web server to transmit report requests to WebFOCUS, then on to customers via the Internet. Meanwhile, the existing business logic could be retained and reused inside of the new WebFOCUS application.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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