Royal Bank of Canada’s digital transformation

A Q&A with Stephan Cloitre, a JLL Technology Solutions consulting leader

In the September 2017 issue of The Leader, Stephan Cloitre, EVP and Sr. Managing Director of JLL Technology Solutions, authored an article alongside our valued client and partner, Nadeem Shabbar, Sr. Vice President and Global Head of CRE at Royal Bank of Canada.

We took a moment to catch up with Stephan and get a behind-the-scenes look at how this article came about, and the supportive role that JLL played within this collaboration.

Q: What prompted your desire to tell the RBC and JLL story, Stephan?

Stephan: RBC is on the leading edge of CRE technology. I felt that their story of establishing a clear six-year strategy and roadmap, execution, reassessment of their progress, and the creation of a continued roadmap for the next iteration was an incredible template for success.

Over the last five years, RBC has created a unique mix of technology that integrates IWMS, point solutions, and service provider solutions to support all of their CRE processes. They are now embarking on a new journey to take their platform to the next level and incorporate advanced business intelligence, IoT, deep learning and artificial intelligence, and finally, smart building and workplace technologies.

Q: Tell me more about the RBC team that you worked with. What was your experience working with them?

Stephan: Nadeem was crucial to setting the vision and championing our progress. We worked closely with Murad Bhatti’s CRE technology team from the very beginning. We always felt that we were all one team working towards the same goal with perfect alignment. This is a truly great team full of innovative minds.

Q: How did you define ultimate success on this collaboration with Royal Bank of Canada?

Stephan: It was all about hiding the complexity of technology: our ultimate measure of success for this project was end-user adoption. Adoption of workplace technologies by occupants, adoption of the custom created dashboards by leadership, and adoption of the software applications by CRE stakeholders.

Q: Give us a glimpse into something about this collaboration that wasn’t shared in “The Leader” article.

Stephan: In the article we didn’t elaborate on the significant role that the JLL account team and the JLL RED technology team played in helping RBC accelerate their technology journey when they selected us as their strategic outsourcing partner. There are many facets to the outsourcing services and the associated technology tools we provide, and without those teams, RBC would not have been able to tackle their technology transformation so quickly.