Digital Channels / Customer Acquisition Project Manager Simulation — Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)

The scenario

RBC's Newcomer Banking segment is one of the bank's fastest-growing acquisition channels. Roughly 400,000 newcomers arrive in Canada each year, and the bank that opens a newcomer's first chequing account usually keeps them for cards, mortgages, and investments a decade later. Today most newcomers still open that first account in a branch — because RBC's online application quietly fails the people who don't yet have a Canadian credit file, a SIN history, or a provincial driver's licence in the exact format the identity-verification engine expects. The Newcomer Online Account Opening Pilot is a $1.3M, 16-week effort to fix that: a streamlined, eight-language online application that verifies newcomer identities through Trulioo's GlobalGateway service and gets a funded account open in under fifteen minutes. You are the project manager, and this is your first project inside RBC's digital channels organization. You are inheriting a clean sheet — the business case is approved, the segment data is compelling, and the executive sponsor wants a working pilot in market before the fall immigration wave. But the project sits on a fault line. The Newcomer Banking segment is measured on conversion and account-opening volume; the Financial Crime Risk team is measured on never letting a fraudulent or unverifiable identity through. Every design decision — how many documents to require, when to fall back to a manual review, how aggressively to auto-decline a mismatch — moves one of those numbers in the wrong direction for somebody. Your job is to ship a pilot that converts newcomers without ever giving the compliance team a reason to pull the emergency brake.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Launch the online newcomer account-opening pilot in two test markets (Greater Toronto Area and Greater Vancouver Area) within the 16-week window
• →Lift the verified application completion rate to ≥45% for newcomer applicants — up from the current ~22% online baseline — without raising the identity-verification false-acceptance rate
• →Deliver the application flow and call-center fallback fully in eight languages
• →Maintain full FINTRAC / PCMLTFA identity-verification compliance — zero accounts opened on an unverified identity
• →Keep the pilot within the $1.3M approved budget and preserve a documented decision trail the Financial Crime Risk team can audit

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •Identity-verification coverage gaps — newcomers from certain source countries may lack documents Trulioo can match, forcing manual review or decline
• •Conversion-vs-compliance tension — the Newcomer segment and Financial Crime Risk pull the same design decisions in opposite directions, with no pre-agreed arbitration
• •Trulioo cost curve — per-verification fees scale with volume and with retries; a high re-attempt rate could blow the variable-cost line
• •Call-center fallback capacity — manual reviews concentrated in a few languages could overwhelm the small bilingual fallback team
• •Localization quality — financial and legal terms translated literally across eight languages can mislead applicants or create compliance exposure

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 6 stakeholders, including Vivian Cheng (Vice-President, Newcomer & Cross-Border Banking), Curtis Pruitt (Senior Director, Personal & Commercial Banking Delivery PMO), Marguerite Thibault (Director, Financial Crime Risk & Regulatory Compliance), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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