RBC ROYAL BANK: SERVICE PLATFORM IMPLEMENTATION
Financial services case studies
Submitted to: Umar
Submitted on: 12/02/2014
Submitted by: Vignesh Kumar
Key Issues:
1.Increase in cost of the service platform implementation.
Many elements lead to the increase in the cost of the programme. It was estimated that the
total programme cost would be $50 million dollars and the initial estimates showed
between $12 million and $15 million annual savings with a payback period of 4 years. But
there were numerous other costs that affected the implementation of the project and put
Cooper’s team in dilemma for implementing the projects.
2. The implementation duration was long and staff had to be trained.
As the project had various issues with cost, time was a constraint. A solid plan was
required to implement the project within the timelines and meet the deliverables.
Complexity in the bank’s structure was also another problem to complete the project in
time. Training the 10,000 Customer Service Representatives (CSR’s) was also not an easy
task, many worked part time as well.
3.The scope of the project kept growing and changing frequently.
The challenges during the implementation of the project were on the rise as the scope of
the project kept on varying. Additional factors such as various types branches (new, old),
improvement in technology (low bandwidth), geographic roll (global) out were in place
and indicated to wider scope of the project. Due to this widening of scope, the major
deliverables were also fluctuating and wavering. A solid plan was not able to be decided as
the scope kept on wavering.
Analysis:
Quantitative Analysis:
The total cost of the project was estimated to be $50 million dollars and the annual savings
were initially estimated to $12-15 million with a payback of 4 years, which was within the
hurdle rate. The initial stages of the project were going extremely well but many issues and
challenges were faced during the course of implementation. The scope of the project kept
wavering and this lead to various other additional costs. The initial estimates for
developing application interfaces was low because the IT had not taken into account of all
the required interfacing devices. Finally the full cost of the project was calculated, it was
determined that the costs doubled and development time was increased.
However with further price negotiation’s and capitalization period changes the project was
looking to be feasible.
But there were problem with the system usability and the company hired Interpix to
evaluate the system. Additional costs incurred to change the interaction with the system
