Tom is joined by Kartik Kaushik, Managing Director and Head of RBC Clear. Kartik shares how he went from building India's first e-commerce platform at Unilever to reimagining corporate transaction banking in the US — and why that unconventional path gave him the customer advocate lens the industry desperately needed. He breaks down why corporate onboarding still takes 45 to 60 days, what it took to compress that to same-day, and how parallel processing and intelligent validation replaced an army of operations staff. Kartik also explains why he rebuilt RBC Clear as fully cloud-native from day one, how co-developing the platform with 28 of their largest clients shaped every product decision, and why the real unlock for treasury isn't just better technology.

Guest quotes:
“ Technology is only as good or as valuable as what the business case or the business intent or the need that you're solving for.”

“ You have to rethink policy, you have to rethink process, you have to rethink everything that's sacrosanct or held as the gold standard in the past. Everything has to be questioned.”

“ All the great products, we become part of their life as a customer, and the customer forgets we exist. That is the best state of any product.”

Links & Resources:

Connect with Tom Gavaghan

Connect with Kartik Kaushik

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Learn more about RBC Clear

YouTube Timestamps:

00:00 Show Intro and Guest Overview

00:26 Kartik's Background

01:44 Building the First E-Commerce Platform in India (1999–2000)

03:17 From Unilever to Citi to RBC

04:28 The Customer Advocate Lens in Corporate Banking

06:23 What Is RBC Clear? Putting Clients in Control of Working Capital

07:27 Co-Developing with 28 Client Advisory Firms

08:42 Why US Corporate Banking Is So Archaic

12:38 Re-Imagining Onboarding: From 67 Days to Same-Day

14:10 Time and Motion Study: The File Was Touched for Only 10.5 Hours

16:50 Pre-Populating Client Data and Intelligent Document Validation

19:58 Parallel Processing: How RBC Eliminated Sequential Handoffs

22:00 Pricing Transparency: Why Bank Invoices Require a PhD to Read

27:46 Flipping from Reactive to Proactive: The "Where Is My Payment?" Problem

29:20 No Published 1-800 Number: Zero Client-Facing Ops After 24 Months

32:14 What Had to Break Internally to Achieve Same-Day Onboarding

37:13 First Fully Cloud-Native Core Banking Payments Business

42:01 Lessons from Unilever: Start with the "So What"

43:50 The Three Types of Workers in an Agentic AI World

49:25 Outro and Wrap-Up

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