Case Study: Royal Bank of Canada achieves gold-standard customer profitability insights and resource optimization with Teradata

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) - Customer Case Study

Royal Bank of Canada’s Canadian Personal & Business (RBC CP&B) faced a classic retail-banking challenge: product-centric costing and average-based profitability measures hid true customer value, causing cross-subsidization and poor resource allocation. To better align customer experience with shareholder value, RBC needed a behavior-based, actionable view of customer profitability across its retail and business lines.

Starting in 1998, RBC built a behavior-driven profitability program with Teradata, developing 80+ strategic and tactical models, segmentations, CRM integration, and Centres of Expertise to translate analytics into frontline actions. The results were dramatic: 101% of personal‑banking profitability concentrated in 20% of customers, 75% of customers moved two or more profitability deciles under the new approach, customer profitability grew ~11% annually, and operational initiatives (eg, automated overdraft decisions, targeted product packages) delivered both efficiency and revenue gains.

Royal Bank of Canada