Greg Brown is responsible for digital sales experiences for BMO North America supporting the Personal, Business Banking and Wealth businesses.
These days few people ever visit their local bank branch anymore. Certainly not to do their everyday banking. They prefer to do it online from the comfort of their home, or using their bank’s mobile app. Need to deposit a cheque? Just take a picture of it with your smartphone! Want a quick short-term loan? Presto! The money is automatically deposited in your account.
Banking was not always this convenient. There was a time, not that long ago, when banks made you do business on their terms. Banker’s hours, they used to call it. Those were the days when you used a passbook to manage your deposits and withdrawals – when you lined up to see a “teller” who would hand over your cash. And if you needed money on a weekend, you were out of luck. Then along came ATM machines. Debit cards. Telephone banking. Internet banking. One technology innovation after another. Banking became, as they say, something you do, not somewhere you go.
Today the financial services industry is going through the most disruptive period of innovation ever: the unbundling of banking services caused by the rise of fintech companies. The change is so dramatic that it threatens the hegemony of traditional banks whose customers are being lured away by a slew of upstart challengers – neobanks, non-bank lenders, payment specialists – providing frictionless, hassle-free experiences.
The fintech industry, now totaling around 1,200 companies in Canada, has forced the normally cautious incumbent banks to speed up their efforts at digital transformation, anxious to halt or at least slow down the rate of silent attrition amongst their customers. But the big banks are starting that race from behind, weighed down by legacy processes and technologies designed for a service model based on branch visits. Their biggest handicap, however, may be their public image as monolithic, stodgy, and uncaring, especially amongst younger customers who are completely at ease with digital banking.
According to Bain and Company, just 29% of customers say they’re loyal to their primary bank. People are simply fed up with being taken for granted. To win back their allegiance, banks must take their cue from the fintechs: help people take greater control of their financial lives though personalized digital tools and apps, relieving them of the stress involved in managing their money. Instead of focusing on maximizing the total number of accounts, banks need to offer their customers greater empowerment, peace of mind and financial wellness. The formula going forward: make banking easy – make it intuitive – make it personalized. Above all, put the customer’s interests first.
The banks do have a few advantages as they battle this insurgency. Lots of historical customer data for one thing – information that can be harnessed to offer proactive advice based on a holistic picture of a customer’s financial health. Plus, their ability to team up with select fintech partners who can extend their service footprint with Personal Financial Management tools for budgeting, payments, and investments.
One Canadian bank making a determined effort to “digitize” is BMO Financial Services which now claims to be “digital first”. Recently Forrester named BMO the overall leader in Canadian mobile banking apps, complimenting it for consistently offering useful features. Now the 8th largest bank in North America, BMO is committed to enhancing the digital experience of customers. Leading those efforts is Greg Brown who’s in charge of BMO’s sales transformation strategy for the Personal, Business Banking and Wealth sides of the bank.
Greg got his career start literally on the shop floor, working for his family’s retail furniture store, where he built his first web site. I started by asking Greg if he’d ever imagined then that he’d be leading digital transformation for one of the biggest banks in North America.
Greg Brown (GB): Definitely not. You know, what’s interesting is, kind of thinking back and reflecting on really growing up in furniture retail, right, I had two parents that grew up in kind of the heyday of retail, you know, working at Sears in various kind of merchandising capacities over the years. And then, in the late ’80s, my father retired from Sears and decided to open up a Leon’s Furniture franchise in Orillia, Ontario when interest rates were probably closer to 20%, so maybe not the best time to jump into a furniture retail enterprise.
You know, they ended up running a pretty successful franchise up until 2016, 2017. And growing up in furniture retail and in a family business, you learn a lot, right? You learn how to wear a lot of hats. You know, you learn how to be entrepreneurial, how to solve problems, how to manage finite resources, how to work hard, including every holiday, every Christmas, Boxing Day. And you learn how to build relationships, and you understand kind of, you know, the importance of driving results. And so I think, a lot of ways, when I look back at that time, like, it really taught me just how to wear many hats, how to be disciplined, and how to, like, run something end to end. And so I think that a lot of those skills I reflect on now in my role in terms of kind of where that brought me to.
You know, I also look at the time I spent at goeasy(1), right? I joined goeasy back in 2009 in a merchandising capacity, which makes sense given my furniture retail background. And it was a great opportunity in a high growth organization to really, you know, learn and develop, you know, as a young person and really got tremendous opportunities there in my seven years at goeasy. I remember back in 2011, when I sat down with our CEO, David Ingram at the time, and he could kind of foresee where digital was going and looked at a retail business that was very much brick-and-mortar, focused on driving traffic into the physical locations, over 200 of them at the time in Canada, about 30 in the U.S. And he said, you know, like, “We need to start thinking about how we’re gonna transform this very kind of traditional lease-to-own business into a digital context. Can you do that?” And I said, “Well, I’ve been on Google before, so I’d probably figure it out.” I had no experience, and I didn’t know what I was doing, you know, but I knew how to, you know, solve problems. I knew I could figure it out.
And that was a really interesting time to be given lots of opportunity to develop and to learn and to, you know, perform, but to fail as well, and to learn through that process. And I really enjoyed my time there and then, you know, transitioned into kind of a similar role, overseeing digital for easyfinancial, which was, of course, their financial services arm and is today as well. And so it was a very, like, I’d say, an iterative process of kind of moving from merchandising from one store to a network of stores, from retail into financial services, and then deciding to join BMO in 2016, which, at that point, I was really attracted to the digital transformation mandate, right?
Like, a lot of banks had been talking about digital transformation for a number of years. It appeared they were getting serious, a lot of buy-in at the top, that this is, like, it’s an imperative now. Like, we need to do this. Like, it’s coming for us. We need to disrupt and change our ways of working and really reorganize how we build digital experiences for customers and to drive business outcomes. And that was really attractive to me to be at really the early days of that shift. And, yeah, been at BMO ever since.
Stephen Shaw (SS): So, as you say, it’s been a progressive evolution, if you will. However, quite a cultural change from a family-owned business to, you know, really a street-level financial services organization, now to a big bank. Has the cultural changes, you know, been a surprise to you, or were you expecting it when you joined the bank, you know, what to expect?