Read this article about BMO Financial Group, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver Digital Transformation, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2020 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program.

BMO is North America’s 8th largest bank, serving 12 million customers. Being Canada’s oldest bank, it has rapidly adapted to meet its customers’ ever evolving needs.

This includes:

• Digitization of new mobile channels and authentication options
• Modernization of real-time global payment infrastructure that is 24/7, simpler, cheaper and information rich
• Prioritization of cyber resiliency and prevention of fraud
• Emerging technologies driving innovation

In addition, the bank is laser-focused on achieving operational efficiencies and improving the overall customer experience.

BMO Vault is a transformation initiative that began in 2019 to modernize the bank’s operating model. BMO performed an end-to-end review of its systems architecture and processes to assess digital readiness in the context of operational stability/reliability and performance. The assessment concluded that architectural platforms are sound to be leveraged by the bank to transform into a modern, digital bank, allowing scale while maintaining strong stability and resiliency.

The transformation involves an end-to-end critical-services approach, focusing on IT change management processes, infrastructure monitoring, vendor governance and organization, rather than focusing on applications and platforms – this is the differentiator. This transformation is addressing critical services in 3 key phases – starting with inoculation and followed by the foundation and transformation phases.

A critical service is an end-to-end service/functionality that has a customer-facing component and directly provides a business functionality to the customer. It leverages other services, processes and solution components across the end-to-end stack.

For example, services such as login, despite being customer facing, do not directly provide a business functionality but instead enable access to a user functionality such as Wire Payments and Electronic Money Transfer.

BMO’s service-oriented technology infrastructure was architected with a principle of thick horizontal services and a thin business application layer that would leverage common services across the enterprise to fulfil customer transactions and services. Though appropriate for the time, the horizontal model of the enterprise architecture did not align and scale with BMO’s growth ambitions and did not reflect the bank’s intense customer focus.

The critical services construct positioned IT tools and assets (such as telemetry and monitoring, vendor solutions), processes (such as IT change management, release planning and vendor governance), technology, business and product teams around critical services to strengthen stability and resiliency when enabling scalability and customer/revenue growth. 

The critical services approach has yielded results including severity of outages and outage time has reduced, IT change success rate has improved, vendor solution stability increased, and overall risk has decreased. The critical services approach will progressively be applied across other banking services to transform BMO into the modern digital bank that customers now come to expect.

To accomplish this transformation, Technology & Operations partnered closely with the bank’s lines of business, including HR, Finance and Risk, to transform and scale the end-to-end critical services capabilities by applying the above-referenced implementation approach. Senior leaders are highly engaged, group heads, business heads, CIOs and other executives have steering committee meetings weekly to review issues, incidents and transformation progress.

About the Awards

The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards have been established to showcase globally the most outstanding organizational achievements through the application of Operational Excellence programs. Click here to view the Press Release.

The winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony at The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Awards (BTOES) on Wednesday, March 25th, 2020, from 6.30pm in the Venetian Ballroom at the Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando Resort.

The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards are open to all organizations, both private and public sector, across the globe, which have implemented Operational Excellence programs to deliver outstanding business results.

The Awards will be held in conjunction with the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit, BTOES 2020 in the beautiful Venetian Ballroom on March 25, 2020 at the Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando™️. Click to access the agenda, view the current speakers, and watch the highlights video from last year.

BTOES.com

The issues in this article are just one of topic areas that are going to be discussed at the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit & Industry

BTOES is the industry’s biggest and best, senior-level, cross-industry gathering of Business Transformation & Operational Excellence industry leaders and senior executives.

It also hosts the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards, which showcase globally the most outstanding organizational achievements through the application of Operational Excellence programs.

The summits hosts a number of private forums for C-Level & Global corporate-level leaders as well as business unit heads.

With over 150 speakers, over 100 sessions, 12 Keynotes, 9 Track Themes, 5 parallel tracks, 60+ track sessions, 50 roundtable discussions, 20 Interactive Workshops, 6 Thought Leader Panels, 5 Leaders Boardrooms, 5 co-located events, the Industry Awards Program, Site Visits, 20+ hours of social networking including 2 gala cocktail parties, dinners, numerous group activities, this is the ultimate event to benchmark, network and drive Operational Excellence to the next level.

Quick Links

Speakers

Agenda

BTOES Awards

There is a strong focus on Cultural Transformation, Customer Delight, Sustaining an Operational Excellence program, Need for end-to-end Business Transformation, Keeping up with new technologies/impact of digitalization and Leadership Buy-in & Understanding. We dedicated two tracks to advanced technologies, such as AI, Machine Learning, RPA, Predictive Analytics, Blockchain, Cloud infrastructure etc.

The agenda is designed to encourage active meaningful conversations though all day enhanced networking and interaction opportunities, including

• All-day Refreshment & Themed Breaks

• 1¼ Hour Hot Breakfast Networking Sessions

• 1½ Hour Hot Plated Networking Lunches with Topic & Industry Sector focussed tables

• 1½ Hour Roundtable Sessions by Topic & Industry Sector.

• Keynote & Themes Panel Sessions

• Hosted Welcome Receptions from 5.30pm

• Expanded more lavish Awards Program

• Newly launched Night Summit for attendees to meet after dinner

For more information or to discuss the summit in more detail please schedule a call below,

Click here to schedule a call.