Good afternoon. My name is Carolyn Burke and I am a vice-president of the Royal Bank of Canada.
I am very pleased to have this opportunity to speak to you about electronic commerce.
My colleague Jeremy Bornstein will be giving a demonstration following these discourses.
RBC is committed to providing both consumers and merchants with easy and secure payment options. We have a proud history of innovation in payments and strongly support Canada's leadership position as an electronic economy.
We are pleased to speak with you about our emerging commerce strategy and activities, and I'm going to address how our solution meets consumers' and merchants' needs for choice, security, and low-cost payments.
Having a credit or debit card on the phone, so consumers can pay differently, is not terribly interesting or very different from how your plastic card works today. What we are doing is working with a cross-section of merchants and consumers to understand their needs and deliver an easy, safe, and rewarding mobile commerce experience. We are working with merchants to help get consumers into their stores more often, giving consumers choice in how they pay—Interac debit, credit, or store gift card—and then providing live receipts in online and mobile banking. Our objectives with this program are to make commerce easier, safer, and more rewarding for consumers and merchants. RBC has always stood for providing clients with choice—choice in how they bank and choice in how they pay. We deliberately waited to bring mobile commerce to market until we were able to offer both Interac debit and credit for payment options.
That said, security is our clients' primary concern and our top priority. We developed a patent-pending mobile payment process and technology called RBC Secure Cloud to protect client payment data behind our firewall instead of putting it on the telephone. This is the first mobile payment service of its kind in Canada. We embedded commerce in our established mobile banking application to make the user experience simple. Payment is never more than two clicks away.
We rely today on the phone's NFC antenna as the last inch between the consumer and the merchant. We believe NFC, near field communications, provides the greatest opportunity today for ubiquitous, universal acceptance, with 19 of the top 25 merchants accepting contactless payments. But we are ready to work with merchants on however they want to get paid, be it NFC, QR code, or even flashes of light.
Finally, our commitment to merchants is that mobile commerce will not increase transactional costs. We will deliver the payment at the lowest cost based on how the client chooses to pay, whether it be Interac debit, credit, or store gift card.
Rather than create a solution in-house and hope that it addresses the needs of consumers and merchants, we engaged more than 60 consumers and merchants in a collaborative road test of our solutions and concepts. Over six months, we discussed how we are thinking about our emerging commerce, shared prototypes of our solutions, and worked together based on their feedback.
To meet those needs, we developed RBC Secure Cloud to make mobile commerce an easy, secure, and cost-effective solution. We started with the industry solutions, but then as RBC has consistently done to maintain our market-leading fraud and client experience, we created a proprietary solution to provide a higher level of security, choice, and client experience. Instead of putting sensitive client data on the telephone, we leave it securely behind our firewall. Importantly, this also allows our clients more choice. They can put all of their average of 2.1 RBC payment cards—Interac debit, primary credit card, and often a store-based co-brand credit card—on the phone. RBC Secure Cloud works by calling down encrypted data from our data centre, decrypting it, and then transmitting it to the payment terminal by NFC. The architecture is extensible to other purposes beyond payments, such as loyalty, identification, or access; however, our focus today is on enabling payment.
Thank you for having us here today. We hope we explained how our solution addresses consumers' and merchants' need for choice, security, and low-cost payments.