RBC unifies Pega and Salesforce to simplify service and operations

The Business Issue

RBC Wealth Management is a top-10 full-service brokerage firm in the U.S., with over 2,100 financial advisors, 190 locations across 42 states, and $570 billion in total client assets under administration. 

Before 2024, RBC’s advisors managed the client relationship in the Salesforce desktop, while relying on Pega to handle service requests like wires or transfers. That meant advisors delivering customer service to their clients were required to operate two different systems simultaneously, causing service times to drag and straining the advisor experience.

Because RBC’s entire organization works from a single Salesforce platform – over 5,000 employees in the U.S. – it had grown cumbersome to manage two separate data sets collaboratively across the front, middle and back office.

Moreover, RBC operates in an industry dictated by regulatory regimes. When the rules change, they have to respond quickly for their clients and to ensure their own internal systems reflect new requirements. 

The Solution

RBC was in no position to move away from their existing investment with either Salesforce or Pega – both platforms remain critical to their way of operating. But in 2022, Pega released a new capability called the Process Extender for Salesforce Lightning – a feature built explicitly to make it easier to expose and action Pega cases within Salesforce. The only prerequisite from RBC’s perspective was to move to Pega Infinity, which they did in March of 2023. That enabled the organization to build a Proof of Concept in June to submit for architecture and infosec review.

By early 2024, RBC had rolled out the Pega Process Extender for their Salesforce organization, a major step in their end goal of creating a unified desktop experience for advisors. And because the capability was an out-of-the-box feature built by Pega, the implementation was much faster and more seamless than a homebuilt integration would have been.

Furthermore, RBC and Pega worked together to enable this functionality on the Salesforce mobile app as well, as some 70% of advisors use the app consistently. 

As of June 2024, RBC advisors can view Pega cases with Salesforce through the Process Extender. But soon to follow in the second half of the year the team will be able to approve, action, and create Pega requests from within Salesforce.

The Results

RBC is still on their Process Extender implementation journey, but already they’ve started seeing some incredible results.

Front office: Advisors have been more productive with better transparency on service requests and fewer clicks. Now they can see the full customer context at the Household level rather than narrowly on the Financial Account level.

Operations: Process Extender has made developers’ lives easier by eliminating redundancies and duplicate work. That has meant simpler maintenance, faster time-to-market, and lower costs for pivoting to address regulatory changes.

“We’re building the rules, we’re building the case, we’re building the process – once,” explained Becky Meisenheimer, Director of RBC Wealth Management, on the Pegaworld 2024 breakout stage. “We build it once in Pega, and that process leverages the out-of-the-box APIs, so maintenance is low and we can get speed to market.” 

RBC’s rollout of the Pega Process Extender for Salesforce Lightning shows how Pega can drive workflow automation even in a non-Pega desktop. By building cases once in Pega and automatically surfacing them in Salesforce, RBC has improved its advisor experience and productivity while reducing the load on dev teams and streamlining client relationship management.

Watch RBC’s entire story from Pegaworld 2024