Addressing the question

We found the question to be quite challenging as we felt that banking is an activity that people like to do in private rather than with social media. Hence, we reached a solution that would allow RBC clients to use the banking services that they would want their friends and family to know about.

The solution

We developed a mobile app called 'RBCDonate' that allows RBC clients to make donations to their favourite charities or non-profit organizations, and with every donation, a Facebook post and a Twitter tweet would be made on their personal profiles pledging their support for that particular organization. Users will get a sense of satisfaction by keeping their friends aware about the charities that they support, and the charities get free advertising as the friends who see the wall post or tweet will now be aware of the charities' existences and may even want to contribute themselves. The advantage of the app to RBC is that every wall post and tweet will mention that the RBCDonate app was used by that individual, thereby promoting a strong brand image of RBC being an organization that gives back to the community. Furthermore, non-RBC clients will feel encouraged to set up an account with RBC in order to use this unique app.

Challenges

There were a lot of challenges building this app given that we only had a week to both come up with an idea and to build a prototype. We coded the app in HTML5 and used Adobe PhoneGap Build to compile the code into an app for Android and Blackberry. Doing this allowed us to make use of the power of web design tools to develop our easy-to-use yet stunning graphical user interface.