Case Study: Royal Bank of Canada achieves a real-time, event-driven data platform with Confluent Platform

Streaming Data Empowers Royal Bank of Canada to be a Data-Driven Organization

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), a global bank serving 16 million clients, faced a complex, regulated data landscape with legacy mainframe systems that caused delayed, costly access and high read workloads. To enable cloud‑native microservices, real‑time analytics and safer data sharing across lines of business, RBC partnered with Confluent and adopted Confluent Platform (Apache Kafka) as the foundation for an event‑driven streaming architecture.

Confluent implemented a centralized real‑time data platform that ingests mainframe and cloud data and provides capabilities like Control Center and Schema Registry; RBC built microservices that offloaded mainframe reads, lowered OPEX and enabled broad data reuse. The Confluent deployment drove rapid adoption (37 teams requested access within six weeks), moved anomaly detection from weeks to real time, supported thousands of applications, and materially reduced costs while accelerating innovation.

Royal Bank of Canada

Kerry Joel

Sr Director, Product Innovation, Data and Analytics