The Royal Bank of Canada has connected with 3.2 million Canadians via its digital app-building efforts, and the lender will soon begin trying to more aggressively convert those users into regular banking clients, the company’s chief executive said Wednesday.

RBC announced the launch of its RBC Ventures Inc. subsidiary in June 2018. At the time, the bank set out to acquire five million users of the various products and services within five years, as well as to convert 10 per cent of those people, or 500,000, to customers of the bank itself.

During a conference call on Wednesday, RBC CEO Dave McKay said they have now made 3.2 million “connections” with Canadians across their ventures, including both those the bank has built and bought.

The focus has been on establishing those ties, which RBC would have previously had to buy in a social media or digital channel, McKay told analysts during the call.

Now, though, RBC is poised to ratchet up its conversion efforts through the 17 ventures it has rolled out to date, such as the Ampli loyalty program, the business-expense tracking app Sorted and the “personal moving concierge” MoveSnap. Another 14 ventures are under development, the CEO said.

“We have a connection to a new Canadian potential client that we never had before, and they’ve come through those 17 ventures,” McKay said. “So we’ve really made that the primary focus and we actually haven’t tried to convert them to RBC product-holders as yet. We’re trying to build deeper relationships, trying to get to know them, and that’s going to pay off over the long term. Having said that, 2020 is a big scaling year, where we are going to start the conversion process through a number of these ventures.”