From 60 days to same day: how RBC Clear is reinventing corporate banking

Corporate treasury teams can move millions of dollars around the world, but many still face banking experiences that feel decades behind consumer finance. In this episode, Thomas Gavaghan speaks with Kartik Kaushik, Managing Director and Head of RBC Clear, about why corporate transaction banking in the U.S. remains so dependent on legacy systems, manual workflows, and opaque service models, and how RBC Clear is rebuilding that experience from the client up.

Kartik explains how corporate onboarding that has traditionally taken 45 to 60 days can be compressed to same-day, why digitizing the front end is not enough, and what it takes to reimagine the full operating model behind corporate money movement. Drawing on his early career as a consumer marketer at Unilever, including work on one of India’s first e-commerce platforms, he shares why customer advocacy may be one of the most important disciplines in modern banking. The conversation also covers co-developing RBC Clear with 28 major clients, simplifying bank pricing, replacing reactive service calls with proactive payment traceability, and helping treasury teams focus less on managing bank complexity and more on working capital.

What you need to know

Kartik Kaushik, Managing Director and Head of RBC Clear, explains why corporate banking has remained dependent on legacy systems, manual workflows, and opaque service models long after consumer finance became digital and intuitive. The through-line of the conversation is that corporate treasury does not need another layer of technology on top of broken processes. It needs banks to rethink the process, policy, pricing, and operating model behind the client experience.

Corporate banking is still built on legacy foundations

Kartik explains that many corporate banking platforms were built decades ago and then expanded incrementally over time. New capabilities were layered onto old infrastructure, but the underlying process often remained unchanged. That is why a consumer can open a bank account from a phone in minutes, while a corporate treasury team may still wait 45 to 60 days to open an account. His point is that the industry’s challenge is not simply technological capability. It is the lack of incentive to transform business models that have continued to function, even if they create friction for clients.

Same-day onboarding requires more than a digital form

RBC Clear’s onboarding transformation began by studying how much time a file was actually being worked on during a 60-plus day process. The answer was roughly hours of real touch time spread across weeks of handoffs, document errors, back-and-forth reviews, and sequential approvals. Kartik explains that RBC Clear rebuilt the process around self-service, pre-filled information, document intelligence, real-time validation, and parallel processing. The result is a model designed to reduce account opening from weeks to the same day, but only because the team rethought policy and process, not just the interface.

Transparency and traceability are part of the product

The episode also explores why treasury teams spend so much time managing bank complexity, from deciphering hundreds of billing codes to chasing payment status updates. Kartik argues that pricing should be organized around logical bundles and customer behavior, not fragmented line items that require constant reconciliation. He also explains how RBC Clear is moving service from reactive to proactive, using event-based architecture to inform clients when files are received, when payments fail, what action is needed, and when transactions are complete.

Treasury should enable working capital, not manage bank friction

Kartik makes the case that treasury’s future role is much larger than safeguarding bank relationships or reconciling operational gaps. As commerce becomes more real time and embedded, treasury teams have an opportunity to help business units create seamless payment experiences, improve working capital efficiency, and support growth. That requires banking partners to remove the grunt work, reduce friction, and give treasury better visibility into money movement so teams can focus on higher-value decisions.

Customer advocacy can be a banking advantage

One of the most distinctive parts of Kartik’s perspective is that he did not begin his career as a banker. His background in consumer marketing shaped a simple but powerful question: what is in it for the customer? He explains that large organizations often become organized around products, functions, geographies, and internal processes, while losing sight of the end-to-end client journey. RBC Clear’s mandate reflects the opposite approach, starting with client pain points and rebuilding around the outcomes treasury teams actually need.

Additional topics covered in this episode

• Why RBC chose to co-develop RBC Clear with 28 of its largest clients.

• How cloud-native architecture changes availability, resilience, and operating design in corporate banking.

• Why banks need to rethink pricing models built around hundreds of AFP codes.

• The role of agentic AI, automation, and human judgment in repeatable finance workflows.

• How Kartik’s experience at Unilever and Citi shaped his approach to change management inside a large bank.