GMC Inspire’s capabilities facilitate BMO’s award-winning digital transformation

GMC Software, the award-winning leader in Customer Communications Management (CCM), announced today that BMO Bank of Montreal has been recognized by Celent as the winner of the Model Bank 2017 award for Process Automation for the most effective deployment of technology to automate business processes or decision-making. Celent is a global research and advisory firm for the financial services industry.  BMO is one of the top five banks in Canada and one of the top 10 banks in North America with more than 12 million customers and 46,000 employees.   

Celent’s annual Model Bank Awards recognize the best practices of technology usage in different areas critical to success in banking. Nominations are submitted by financial institutions and undergo a rigorous evaluation process by Celent analysts. Celent judges submissions on three core criteria: demonstrable business benefits of live initiatives; the degree of innovation relative to the industry; and the technology or implementation excellence. 

The award-winning initiative was integral to BMO’s strategy to meet the heightened expectations of customers by accelerating the deployment of digital capabilities. To undertake this transformation of its business, BMO adopted GMC Software’s customer communications management technology to build a solution that enabled a seamless and intuitive customer and employee experience. 

BMO utilized GMC Software’s GMC Inspire Interactive, a web-based self-service customer communications portal, to create elegant, standardized eForm designs that simplify how the bank ingests documents, as well as to significantly streamline processes for customers and for the bank’s business users. The technology implementation introduced a new mobile onboarding customer journey that enables consumers to open a BMO Personal Banking account on a smartphone in eight minutes from start to finish—a first in Canada.  From an internal perspective, the multi-step workflow involved in opening accounts is now entirely paperless and does not require the customer to enter a physical branch. 

BMO's organization-wide effort to transform internal processes and the subsequent customer experience resulted in:

• Increased frontline capacity, leading to more customer conversations and incremental revenue increase up to $8.9 million USD.
• Prospective customers can open a bank account in less than eight minutes using their smartphones.
• Reduction of errors/irregularities within the personal banking account opening process of up to 80 percent.
• Increase in process efficiency of around 40 percent across personal banking onboarding; with an 80 percent increase in the audit process. 

“The Model Bank Awards recognize how banks are using technology to change the face of banking,” said Zilvinas Bareisis, senior analyst at Celent. “These banks should serve as an inspiration to others looking for strong examples of best practice implementation that will have a truly meaningful impact on business results and the industry overall. The entry from BMO Bank of Montreal clearly demonstrated this.”

“GMC Software is honored to be a part of BMO Bank of Montreal’s digital transformation and we congratulate BMO on winning the Celent Model Bank Award for Process Automation as a result of this industry-leading initiative,” said Scott Draeger, VP of Product, GMC Software.  “Few banks can claim an end-to-end digital experience and therefore BMO has established itself as a trail-blazer in digital transformation. We look forward to our next collaboration with this tremendous organization.”

The Celent Model Bank Awards were presented at Celent’s sold-out Insight & Innovation Day on Tuesday, April 4, 2017 in Boston. BMO was selected a winner from among 150 nominations, a record since 2012. 

To read the Celent case study, “BMO: Digital Transformation in Private Banking Winner of Celent Model Bank 2017,” please click here.