One evening in early 2024, treasury officials at a Fortune 50 company were eyeing a screen nervously. Just four hours after beginning the onboarding process for Royal Bank of Canada’s new US cash-management platform, they were about to transact on it for the first time.
They couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing; some asked themselves if they had merely been shown a demo.
“How do we know it’s real?” asked one.
They got their answer soon enough, by transacting into and out of the account and seeing it happen in real time. It was, in the words of one observer, a moment of truth.
Their surprise was understandable. Corporate account openings of this nature can often take 45 days – doing it in four hours isn’t normal. But then there is not much very normal about RBC Clear, a US transaction-banking platform that RBC started to develop in October 2022 and formally launched in April this year.
To listen to those at the sharp end of developing it over the last 18 months or so, it has been little short of building a bank inside a bank – but doing most of it differently from anything that has been done before.
RBC’s
