Since 1817, Canada’s first bank, Bank of Montreal (BMO), has focused on building, investing and transforming itself to drive performance and deliver growth for its customers, clients and communities. Over the centuries, BMO has grown to become the eighth largest bank in North America, serving 13 million customers.
BMO’s strategic initiatives to help its customers make real financial progress – including the launch of a digital-friendly savings account and a free, interactive digital financial education hub for all Canadians – has been duly recognised by The Digital Banker, which presented the bank with two honours at the Digital CX Awards 2024, held in Singapore.
For its SmartProgress™ solution, which aims to enhance financial literacy among all Canadians and not just its customers, BMO picked up the Outstanding Use of Digital Channels for Improved CX award, and for its Savings Amplifier product, BMO won the Best Technology Implementation for Digital CX award.
Increasing Financial Literacy
Given the economic uncertainty prevailing on a global scale and BMO’s focus on driving real financial progress for Canadians, BMO launched SmartProgress™ , an interactive digital financial education hub that is free to use for all Canadians and not just BMO customers. Built together with Everfi, a provider of financial education software, SmartProgress™ helps foster understanding of financial concepts through self-directed, interactive learning.
SmartProgress™ helps foster understanding of financial concepts through self-directed learning.
Citing research from The Real Financial Progress (RFP) Index, BMO stated that there was a prevailing financial anxiety among Canadians, with a staggering 77% expressing the desire for more knowledge in areas such as savings, investing, retirement planning, budgeting, credit scores and home buying.
Recognising this need, BMO launched its new online learning platform with over 40 learning modules on personal finance. Stepping away from conventional approaches and taking a forward-thinking stance, the bank decided to make the learning modules interactive and seamlessly organised into curated playlists, making the one-stop platform accessible to all Canadians.
Additionally, the educational content from the platform is also being utilised in BMO branches. It is also leveraged for in-person workshops and webinars to increase financial literacy at the community level.
Taking the Work Out of Saving
With the Savings Amplifier product, BMO set out to help its customers make real financial progress by enabling them to seamlessly open a new savings account straight through their mobile phones, set up and track their savings goals, and fund them through recurring and intelligent custom transfers for no monthly fees, a competitive interest rate and unlimited no-fee transfers to other BMO accounts, with customers able to set this up within minutes through their mobile banking app.
The idea for the new features came from observing a consistent theme when conducting customer research on saving habits. BMO noticed that customers were trying to maintain a certain balance threshold in their chequing accounts. On digging deeper, it found that savings goals was the most desired feature, followed by an automated transfer facility that would help customers save while preserving the minimum balance in their source accounts.
Similar features implemented by other financial institutions, such as saving the change and automated savings based on external events such as hitting a workout goal, proved substantially less popular with customers.
The result: a mobile banking experience with multiple components woven seamlessly together to help customers with one goal in mind: save. Needless to say, the rollout was met with high account opening rates, even outperforming BMO’s business case forecasts to date, and ultimately helping the bank close a crucial gap in digital money management.
For BMO, the initiative has been a resounding success both from a customer satisfaction and engagement perspective, while also outperforming business expectations.
