Keynote Talks

Bob Blainey, RBC Fellow

Software Delivery Excellence at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) – Moving Fast and Not Breaking Things

RBC is Canada’s biggest bank and one of the largest in the world based on market capitalization with over 100,000 employees serving more than 18 million clients in Canada, the United States and 27 other countries. Any organization of this complexity invests deeply in software to automate operations, support staff, and engage their clients. This is no different at RBC, but we also have a special responsibility to win and retain the trust of our clients as we operate across multiple lines of business in many jurisdictions globally which must comply with numerous regulations. This talk will discuss how RBC’s software delivery process has evolved to ensure new products and innovations are delivered quickly to clients while maintaining the highest standard of safety and security. Featured discussions will include how to resolve the tension between control and innovation, the imperative to build secure systems, and the impact we’re seeing of AI on our architecture and software delivery process.

Bob Blainey is one of three RBC Fellows and is responsible for driving strategic value creation from Data and AI across RBC. Formerly, Bob was the Chief Architect for Personal & Commercial Banking and led the technical strategy for APIs and open banking. Bob is passionate about building great engineering teams and leveraging the very best technology to deliver unique and engaging customer experiences.

Before joining RBC in 2017, Bob worked at IBM for over 25 years holding progressive leadership roles in Engineering and Architecture. In 2011, Bob was appointed an IBM Fellow, which is IBM’s most prestigious technical honour.

Bob holds a Computer Science degree from University of Toronto and a Master of Business Administration from Athabasca University, focused on the creation of open source software ecosystems and related business strategy.

Outside of spending time with his family, Bob is a fan of and at times borderline obsessive about baseball and is passionate about STEM and particularly engineering & coding education for K-12.