In March 2020, RBC hired Sid Paquette, a veteran investor at OMERS Ventures, to run a new banking group dedicated to funding tech companies—at the time a major move into tech financing. Today, Canada’s largest bank announced that it is doubling down on that effort, expanding the division to offer a suite of products beyond traditional lending through a platform it’s calling RBCx.

Some of the products RBCx plans to offer include:

• Operational advice from specialists in particular sectors, such as life sciences and cleantech
• Events with RBC’s network of founders and investors
• Custom personal-banking services, including credit cards, wealth management and personal finance
• Proprietary research and guidance

“At the end of the day, this platform is built to help startups become scale-ups,” said Paquette, head of RBCx, in an interview with The Logic.

In a world flush with investor cash, lenders have been trying to find ways to stand out. In one of the most successful examples of a full-service investment company, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz offers its portfolio companies a network of experts and business veterans that can help with anything from marketing to recruiting. “As you scale, there’s far more than just capital you need,” Paquette said. 

Paquette wouldn’t specify which services RBCx plans to roll out first, but said they don’t exist in the Canada marketplace today. Any businesses banking with RBC would have access to the platform, which combines the offerings of a specialized bank with those of a consulting firm. “From market reach alone, into the organizations that matter, we service far more organizations than any of the VCs globally would,” he said.

Paquette, one of Canada’s most high-profile investors, will be joined by a number of notable hires from the VC and tech financing ecosystem, including Tony Barkett and Tyler Kirk from Silicon Valley Bank and Nicole Kelly and Anthony Mouchantaf from OMERS Ventures. The group will launch with about 80 employees recruited from both within and outside of RBC, and plans to grow the team past 100 people by the end of the year, Barkett said. Instead of splitting its tech practice into different branches based on geography, as the bank did before, RBCx will be focused on all of Canada. Paquette wouldn’t say how much money RBC was putting into the effort.

The launch of a full-service platform like RBCx could help the bank stay ahead of competitors as other firms spin up groups dedicated to serving technology companies. BMO and Scotiabank, for example, both have banking groups specifically for tech and innovation, while a 2019 subscriber survey from The Logic found that Silicon Valley Bank has emerged as a top debt lender for Canadian startups.