Canada's Largest Lender Enters Wealth Management Digital Fray

Josh O'Neill

4 May 2017

Two subsidiaries of Canada's largest lender have launched a new platform aimed at financial advisors that offers a range of wealth management solutions, in the latest push by firms to enhance their digital offerings.

Royal Bank of Canada's correspondent services and advisor services units yesterday announced the launch of BLACK, a new integrated financial advisor platform.

RBC says that BLACK allows advisors to streamline client interaction while offering a wider array of capabilities.

“The BLACK platform truly addresses the needs of our independent broker dealers and registered investment advisor clients,” said Brett Thorne, head of RBC Correspondent Services and RBC Advisor Services. “The world of financial services along with technology is rapidly changing. We wanted to build an exclusive advisor platform to help our firms and their advisors realize opportunities, gain efficiencies and thrive in this new environment.”

RBC partnered with various financial technology, or fintech, firms to create the range of solutions integrated into BLACK.

Partners included CircleBlack, for client account aggregation and portfolio analytics; Redtail, for customer relationship management; Riskalyze, for risk alignment; MoneyGuidePro, for financial planning; and Vestmark, for trading and rebalancing.

“CircleBlack worked closely with RBC to design and build BLACK specifically for RBC’s clearing and custody clients,” said John Michel, chief executive of CircleBlack. “BLACK is a cutting edge platform, built on the latest scalable web technologies and seamlessly enables secure data flow between all the partners.”