March 2018

RBC’s Women Attribute Recognition from the Tech Industry to a Collaborative, Client-Focused Approach


Winner of Technology Innovator of the year
Kim Prado, Global Head of Client Insight,
Banking and Digital Channels Technology,
RBC Capital Markets

Winner of Support Professional of the Year
Anitha Iniyavan, Global Market Data Engineer,
RBC Capital Markets

At the recent Women in Data and Technology Awards in London, RBC’s Kim Prado and Anitha Iniyavan emerged triumphant in the Technology Innovator and Support Professional categories respectively. The pair explained how their oversight of several key infrastructure projects had required strategic collaboration and an unwavering focus on an optimal end user experience.

Prado has been spearheading multiple in-house and vendor technology projects in support of RBC’s Capital Markets business. Prado’s work has been nothing short of transformative.  She is a visionary and has a very clear concept of an optimal end-user experience.  “The opportunities in technology are endless” she explains “there’s always an answer if you have the imagination and desire to improve the customer experience”.  Prado’s art is to re-imagine mission-critical systems used by the firm’s sales, trading and analyst staff and unify processes and outputs across business lines.  By filling in gaps, improving transparency and safeguarding a robust audit trail throughout, her work has enabled the firm to present a single face to clients. 

A new global CRM system utilizes the latest artificial intelligence to gain insight into client trading strategies, helping RBC adapt its service more closely to end user needs.  Prado’s Salesbook project has streamlined colleague access to client information which had hitherto existed in disparate locations.  Prado explained “My team has successfully employed machine learning techniques to connect RBC inventory, including trader-identified ‘axes’ or desirable securities with client data points to present attractive trading proposals to our sales teams.”

By working with other Fintech leaders like OpenFin, Prado has driven for greater interoperability between systems which has promoted agility and has accelerated time to market on new products and feature functionality.  As a champion of analytics, her work with companies like Paxata helps assure that the bank’s huge data holding is clean, contextual and thoroughly effective in helping RBC gain greater insights into client requirements. 

Prado is also committed to ensuring that the technology sector itself is doing whatever it can to develop a pipeline of new talent.  She encourages her technology experts to participate in the RBC Teaching Kids to Code initiative to promote technology as a great career that is bursting with opportunities for women. 

In the ‘support’ category, award winner Anitha Iniyavan demonstrated her value to the firm by acquainting and familiarizing an entire business with new technology.  In this firm-wide roll-out of an instant messenger platform, Iniyavan had a hand in the chat-bot development as well as the onboarding process whilst running all the training elements.  But she didn’t stop there and was soon working with other platform teams to smooth the integration with existing applications to protect and enhance the end user experience.