Transformation at Bank of Montreal

Bank of Montreal is nominated in the Transformative Innovator of the Year category at the Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025. We asked the bank to present its strategy and actions in terms of transformation.


What transformation strategy has your organization led in recent years?

At BMO, we are committed to helping our customers make real financial progress. All our initiatives and innovations are centered on this mission and BMO Digital is tasked with spearheading this effort along with driving end to end digitization, mitigating digital fraud risk and cross-channel alignment. Digital plays a unique role in driving growth, loyalty and efficiency as part of the enterprise Digital First strategy.


What prompted this strategic transformation?

We identified lagging performance across numerous benchmarks measuring customer sentiment, platform engagement as well as key feature gaps vs. the market. This started on the digital journey in 2022 / 2023 to re-platform in Canada and build key features aligned with our purpose of helping customers achieve Real Financial Progress. This has translated to significant growth in benchmark performance and customer satisfaction.

What have been the most significant changes implemented, and how were they led?

In 2023, we co-created a completely new design with our customers for our aged online banking platform, building an entirely new experience from the ground up while transforming the entire technology stack. This has resulted in a consistent and clear experience across multiple channels and platforms. The new platform and optimized product positioning has increased product sales for existing customers with significant increase in application starts and completion rates. Using leading edge technologies, we increased efficiencies by 3X and have driven significant ROI. 

This was fast followed by the launch of innovative features such as Same Day Grace - a low balance alert informing customers when they are overdrawn and enabling them to to rectify and return to a positive balance in the same day (without incurring any NSF charges)


What unique or key transformation practices do you follow to ensure success?

We undertook a multi-prong approach to ensure success including introduction Agile product and software development methodologies, introduction of modern programming frameworks and tools and organizational alignment including executives, operations and finance to support this new approach. We started by standing up a Agile Center of Excellence to implement agile development practices into a legacy technology environment to improve our ability to deliver value to our customers faster and respond to change easily. 

Along implementing Agile, we also started to modernize our infrastructure and systems including building services on cloud environments (AWS, GCP) and modernizing our development pipelines. We ensured support and alignment from leadership resulting in the entire process from idea conception to production launch was optimized while keeping our customers at the center of everything.

How has your workforce been engaged and transformed through this journey?

BMO leverages agile processes and cross-functional pods to maximize efficiency and drive high-value outcomes. In addition, BMO Digital also has an in-house seed stage incubator called InnoV8. BMO recognized an unmet need for industry change thus leading to the launch of an enterprise innovation team with a mission to explore, test and accelerate the commercialization of “seed stage” concepts. InnoV8 is an incubator at BMO Digital that has consistently and successfully moved innovative ideas through a Proof-of-Concept pipeline towards market launch. Very few large firms operate as successful innovators, most struggle to deliver innovative solutions to market. With InnoV8 BMO has been able to create a robust innovation pipeline, bringing many patented and patent-pending novel initiatives to market.


What measurable outcomes demonstrate the success of your transformation?

Within the last five years - BMO went from bottom of rankings across a number of industry benchmarks and metrics to top-tier. This was underpinned by:

Growth across all key performance metrics:
- >25% increase in digitally active users since start of 2022
- 10% growth in customers interacting with digital features that drive Real Financial Progress
- Consistent app store ratings >4.5 for both iOS and Android
- 10% lift in customer satisfaction scores
- Maintaining industry leading digital sales productivity

Along with more recent industry recognition:
- Celent Model Bank awards for IT transformation, Same Day Grace, Pre-Authorized Payment Manager, Payments Innovation, BOTW Conversion
- #1 ranking in eMarketer's Emerging Mobile Features benchmark 2 years in a row and 3 times in the last 4 years