RBC Business Banking - RBC PayEdge Onboarding

Background & Overview

RBC acquires WayPay, a fintech startup focused on automation of payables.

Royal Bank of Canada is a Canadian multinational financial services company and the largest bank in Canada by market capitalization. The bank serves over 17 million clients and has more than 89,000 employees worldwide.

Acquired by RBC in 2019, RBC PayEdge (formerly known as WayPay) is an accounts payable software for small to medium sized businesses. The cloud-based platform helps companies improve their payables automation, reconciliation, and approvals process.

My Role & What I Did

Senior Interaction Designer.

RBC has a mature design practice. As a result, each product team is assigned multiple designers with various specialties. I worked closely with a visual designer and a content designer, along with the larger engineering squad and our business partners. I was responsible for:

Stakeholder interviews
User research
Information architecture
Interaction design
Rapid prototyping
Documenting patterns, annotations, and best practices

Main Challenge

Existing onboarding process did not meet strict regulatory requirements related to privacy and fraud.

The eventual goal of RBC PayEdge is to be positioned as a value-added service to new and existing business banking clients. The platform’s key objectives are to:

Challenge #1

Existing client onboarding process did not meet RBC’s KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements, as well as regulatory requirements related to privacy and fraud

Challenge #2

Businesses with more than one owner could not be digitally onboarded, requiring manual intervention by a client care representative

Based on these challenges, we developed a preliminary path to success:

Goal #1

Provide a simple and easy experience for onboarding to RBC PayEdge

Goal #2

Ensure stable revenue and drive long-term growth of RBC’s Business Banking division.

Goal #3

Modify existing process to meet all KYC and AML requirements

Goal #4

Digitize manual forms, personal ID verification, and business verification

Discovery & Research

Complex corporate structures were flagged as high-risk by the bank. High rates of abandonment were also observed.

The data points that we collected as part of discovery did not seem to belong to any particular category. One of the first tasks I did was to perform an information architecture exercise and group these into logical segments that would provide meaningful structure to the whole onboarding flow.

Whiteboard sketches of RBC PayEdge Onboarding project

Prior to acquisition by RBC, all types of business were allowed to become part of the platform. With RBC’s strict regulatory requirements, we identified that certain categories of business could not be digitally onboarded. This includes the following:

Money Service Businesses,
Depository Institutions,
Non-depository Institutions, and
Others

I also worked with an external vendor to help RBC verify individual identity of the person signing up for the platform. To prevent any interruptions to the onboarding flow, we provided a QR code that could be scanned with a mobile device. The personal identification verification flow would then be completed as a parallel step.

As part of meeting RBC’s Anti-Money Laundering requirements, we introduced a step to check company name and information against a centralized database of businesses. Successful search result means less friction to the client. It provides an extra layer of verification to satisfy risk management requirements. Should the company name not be found in the database, extra steps such as manual data entry would be required.

We would pre-populate any additional fields such as company owners and ownership percentages to improve client experience. Not all information returned is correct or up-to-date. It would ultimately still be up to the client to verify and confirm.

A requirement to select a mandatory primary contact was identified, and after several design iterations and testing with users, we landed on a card-like approach with the “Primary Contact” radio button upfront and centre. This design satisfied the Know Your Customer requirement and made it simple for the user to interact with at the same time.

Results & Impact

We received an industry award for best practices of technology usage critical to success in banking.

In March 2021, RBC was recognized by Celent, a leading research and advisory firm focused on technology for financial institutions globally.

The bank’s holistic approach to transforming payments to encourage adoption and optimize use cases by embedding e-payments in workflows and translating relevant payment data into valuable client insights.

A solution that drove this transformation is RBC PayEdge (formerly WayPay).

RBC PayEdge - Onboarding

Onboarding experience for RBC PayEdge, a platform that lets businesses automate payments by integrating with their accounting system.

December 2019 - June 2020