Dealership clients growing in size and geographical footprint, increasing management complexity.
Limited capabilities on asset classes, curtailment and interest structures, VIN validation and valuations, restricting business expansion.

Solution

Leveraged a flexible, API-enabled architecture to cut time to market for new features while strengthening security.
Delivered seamless, non-disruptive migration for existing clients.

Results

Improved time to market and increased flexibility due to the configurability of the platform
Simplified operational activities and improved client experience, driven by the modern architecture of the platform
Closed new deals for multi-million-dollar growth

Challenges

Canada’s auto dealer marketplace is evolving, as dealerships consolidate into regional and national groups
As dealers grow domestically and internationally, they require larger and more complex finance products
Evolving regulatory and commercial requirements demand agile responses

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) delivers exceptional experiences to 17 million clients in Canada, the U.S. and 27 other countries. In the bank’s automotive finance business, the organization serves the needs of manufacturers, auto dealers, lease companies and daily rental clients across Canada.

Senior Manager of Commercial Automotive Finance Technology Bernie MacEachern says: “Over the last 30 years, Canada’s auto dealer landscape has evolved significantly. Smaller dealerships are increasingly consolidating into regional and national groups, which are themselves growing. In fact, over 60% of our dealership clients are now medium- or large-sized groups.”

Director of Commercial Automotive Finance Technology Mark Filipowicz continues, “As dealership groups in Canada grow, many are targeting expansion into the U.S. As the size and geographical reach of these groups increases, so do their financing requirements.”

RBC saw an opportunity to offer new financial solutions, such as syndicated loans, to its customers. The bank targeted a solution that would enable it to pursue these valuable growth opportunities, while also offering the flexibility to meet future regulatory and commercial requirements.

Filipowicz confirms, “Winning new clients through loan syndication represents a multi-million-dollar opportunity for RBC. To realize the goal, we looked for a way to create and manage complex financing deals efficiently and offer clients custom solutions to support their business growth plans.”

Our new OverDrive offering, powered by OpenText STP Financial Hub, has already played a key role in providing customized solution for a capital markets client.

Mark Filipowicz
Director, Commercial Automotive Finance Technology, RBC

Solution

RBC launched RBC-OverDrive, a solution powered by STP Financial Hub and supported by OpenText B2B Managed Services, enabling larger and more complex financing products, increased efficiencies and the flexibility to keep pace with industry imperatives.

Products deployed

OpenText™ STP Financial Hub

Reduce manual work and minimize operational risk with automated end-to-end processing

Services provided

Business Network Cloud Enterprise

Leverage people, processes and technologies to manage B2B integration requirements

Leveraging a secure, API-enabled platform

“With OpenText STP Financial Hub, we can easily manage dealer groups that span multiple regions, countries and currencies,” says MacEachern. “New prospects are increasingly assessing our digital capabilities as part of their selection process, so the user experience can make or break a deal. For that reason, it was vital to streamline key user journeys for large dealerships, such as transferring assets between dealerships in different regions and accessing and extracting reporting data.”

With STP Financial Hub, the bank can shape custom, data-driven workflows to structure new deals with ease, while minimizing automotive financing risks with built-in curtailment management.

“The OpenText solution allows us to build new offerings and to make our existing products more automated and client-centric,” says Filipowicz. “We also greatly appreciate the fact that OpenText STP Financial Hub offers a range of capabilities to enhance the client experience—including an intuitive user interface, simplified business activity workflows and instant access to operations data via dashboard reports.”

Built on a secure, API-enabled technology platform, the new commercial finance solution ensures that clients can gain a high-level view and drill down into the performance of individual dealerships and assets.

Filipowicz elaborates, “As dealership groups expand their operations across Canada and into the U.S., it’s crucial that they can roll up their position to the group level. With OpenText STP Financial Hub, we can handle this kind of complexity—which is inherent in syndicated loan arrangements—in a way that’s totally transparent to the user.”

Delivering seamless migration

RBC worked with OpenText to rapidly bring its clients onto the new solution and provide knowledge-transfer to help dealers hit the ground running.

MacEachern comments, “Throughout the project, OpenText was extremely nimble and responsive to short-notice changes to the scope of work and pulled out all the stops to help us stay on target and achieve a successful, disruption-free transition for our dealership clients.”

Filipowicz adds, “OpenText helped us to complete the whole deployment process—from integration and testing to migration and go-live—within an extremely tight timeline, which was an outstanding achievement for such a complex project. The seamless switchover allowed us to maintain high levels of satisfaction from existing clients, while the short time to market enabled us to enter into negotiations with new prospects ahead of competitors.”

With OpenText STP Financial Hub, we can easily manage dealer groups that span multiple regions, countries and currencies.

Bernie MacEachern
Senior Manager, Commercial Automotive Finance Technology, RBC

Results

With STP Financial Hub at the heart of its next-generation OverDrive offering, RBC can serve a fast-growing client base while unlocking the commercial opportunities of loan syndication.

Gained a flexible, scalable solution

“Our partnership with OpenText offers us all the capabilities we need to make our new OverDrive solution a success: speed, scalability, flexibility and risk management,” says Filipowicz.

“In partnership with OpenText, we deployed rapidly, without any disruption for our existing clients. With OpenText STP Financial Hub, we have a scalable platform that will support us as our loan volumes increase—and offer the flexibility to develop new capabilities to meet the evolving needs of our market.”

Accelerated client processes

With support for fine-grained user entitlements, the new solution allows RBC to deliver powerful self-service capabilities for its dealerships.

“OverDrive is saving time for our clients, and some processes have been reduced from hours to just minutes,” comments Filipowicz. “For example, reporting is now significantly faster. Dealerships can extract data directly from the platform in user-friendly spreadsheet format, helping them to get the insights they need immediately.”

“Our dealers now get an instant overview of their portfolio as soon as they log into OverDrive,” adds MacEachern, “with the ability to drill down into individual assets and slice their data into used, new and wholesale vehicle leasing accounts with a single click.”

“The solution also offers powerful capabilities to mitigate risk. As well as simplifying internal and external audits through automated reporting, the OpenText solution can proactively detect and alert employees to investigate unexpected changes in business activity.”

Closed multi-million-dollar opportunities

Since going live with its new commercial financing platform, RBC has leveraged its new capabilities to help close several major acquisitions and new client deals. By supporting the financing needs of large national and international dealership groups, the bank is positioning itself for multi-million-dollar business growth in the years ahead.

“Our new OverDrive offering, powered by OpenText STP Financial Hub, has already played a key role in providing customized solution for a capital markets client,” concludes Filipowicz. “Today, we’re in a much stronger position to pursue new business opportunities in Canada and the U.S., which will make an important contribution to the growth of our commercial auto finance business. Going forward, we’re excited to work with OpenText to build on what we’ve achieved and deliver even higher-quality services to clients in Canada and beyond.”