RBC sees benefits from city reductions

Royal Bank’s decision to close 25 branches over the past year, mainly in city centres across Canada, is having a minimal impact on clients who increasingly favour an array of digital banking options, the company said Wednesday.

Neil McLaughlin, head of Canadian personal and commercial banking, says the decision to shutter an overabundance of locations in some areas was aimed at redirecting costs of its operations.

“The core focus is thinning out (our) dense urban branch footprint where we’re not really impacting the convenience for customers,” he told analysts during the bank’s third-quarter conference call.

“You may go from a two-minute drive to your branch to a three-minute drive.”

It’s part of a broader plan by the Torontobased bank that included announcing 450 job cuts in June, mainly at its headquarters, and reinvesting in areas like data analytics and artificial intelligence.

RBC has rolled out new technologies designed to make it easier for customers to handle daily banking on their smartphones. It recently launched an option to pay bills using Siri, the voice assistant of Apple’s iPhone.

Those efforts helped the bank reach a milestone in the quarter where the total number of mobile banking sessions eclipsed online banking visits. Mobile transactions rose 40 per cent over the past year, it said.