RBC Capital Markets modernises process and content services

According to James ‘Jim’ Williams, Managing Director, Head of Operations and Shared Services Technology at RBC Capital Markets, “Many of our existing applications and platforms are difficult to maintain and modernize. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform helps us modernize content and document rich applications because it understands the details behind a document, not just the fact that it exists.”

Williams noted:  “A critical need was support for legally-mandated post-trade activities, including the process-intensive workflows required to comply with tax regulations.”

Further, with more than 100 custom applications, RBC Capital Markets needed to streamline legacy systems and migrate outdated business process management (BPM) software that lacked rich document management capabilities. RBC Capital Markets required a platform that integrated both process and content capabilities, as well as one that provided support for accelerated application development leveraging DevOps to support continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and cloud deployment.

Designed to meet the demands of RBC Capital Markets’ growing business, Alfresco now serves as the basis for 14 critical applications supporting the needs of 3,500 business users, or 50 percent of the workforce. Alfresco-powered solutions are now supporting numerous business-critical functions for RBC Capital Markets, including: Tax Operations, Regulatory Compliance, Regulatory Request Management, Job Attestation Monitoring, Equity Trade Confirmations, Payment Allocations, Risk Limit Management, and Resource Onboarding.

Another benefit of the Alfresco Platform at RBC Capital Markets has been the ability to keep pace with a rapidly growing business. “We can now meet our business requirements with a much faster turnaround,” noted Ruchi Saraswat, Director, Global Head of Tax Operations. By using the Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF) to accelerate solution development, IT can build applications rapidly and iteratively using reusable pre or custom-built components. “It’s like using building blocks, where we build all the modules and put them together,” Saraswat explains. “Reusable components really help our team enormously.”

She also credits Alfresco’s Customer Success team with helping RBC Capital Markets get up to speed quickly. “We can easily take on new challenges because we know we’ve got Alfresco backing us up.”

With Alfresco process automation, content management and development tools, RBC Capital Markets has increased operational efficiency, tightened internal controls, and strengthened regulatory compliance. Common user experiences across the company have increased adoption and streamlined work, while the flexible and future-proof Alfresco platform enables RBC Capital Markets to adapt to dynamic markets by building new solutions as needed and deploying quickly using the latest DevOps tools, including Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Maven, Jenkins, and Git.

Alfresco CEO Bernadette Nixon observed: “The RBC Capital Markets implementation is a perfect example of how organizations can leverage process, content and rapid application development for business advantage. The stable, scalable and supportable applications built on Alfresco have generated significant interest across various business units within RBC, and the firm is evaluating several future applications to be built on the now-standardized Alfresco platform. We are thrilled with the success that RBC has achieved with Alfresco, and we applaud their approach to innovation and modernization.”