The Bank of Montreal (BMO) is in the trenches with automation.

The $767.4 billion bank leverages robotic process automation (RPA) internally to improve the customer and employee experience, said Atul Verma, CIO of BMO’s U.S. personal and business banking division.

“We have been on a journey for robotic process automation for quite some time as a company,” Verma told Bank Automation News. “We’ll be using [bots] extensively in our contact centers for agents to be more efficient as they navigate multiple applications.”

BMO also leverages application programmable interface (APIs) for internal and external capabilities, he added.

“APIs, that’s a huge area of focus for us,” Verma said. “We rely on APIs for how we deal with the ecosystem. So our journey in that context is pretty wide range.”

Bank Automation News: What has BMO automated within the last six months?

Atul Verma: I have actually a very exciting example. It’s a program that we have undertaken about a year and a half ago to build a new business banking platform from an account origination perspective. This is a brand-new platform, we call it “Business Banking Xpress.” It’s a brand-new build for us; we are actually collapsing two legacy platforms into this new one and going forward to the combined platform for North America.

That program is working really well. And it’s providing automation around many of the origination activities, both from a customer perspective, as well as from an employee point of view, we are able to see results now, which are pretty dramatic. For example, for business deposit accounts, we’re able to open the accounts in minutes. And for the loan lending account, it’s a few hours, [down] from weeks before. … Most of that benefit came from automation of multiple different tasks in that workflow.

BAN: What innovative technology are you keeping your eye on?

AV: That’s actually really necessary for us to truly build what we’re calling the digital transformation bank, right? So you’ll hear that term in our context quite a bit. We have been on a journey for robotic process automation for quite some time as a company. We’ll be using [RPA] extensively in our contact centers for agents to be more efficient as they navigate multiple applications. We have been on a journey for robotic process automation for quite some time as a company.

APIs are a huge area of focus for us. We rely on APIs for how we deal with the ecosystem. So our journey in that context is pretty wide ranging. And we’re looking for internal and external capabilities. We’ll talk a lot about partnerships we’re building, for example, and having a robust API infrastructure really helps with us, especially with external capability, but it also streamlines all the integrations we have to do internally.

Obviously, data: You’re looking at a lot of data capabilities, streamlining how we handle data, looking at potentially a cloud journey for our data capabilities, or warehouse. And then on the context of the CRM, we want to make sure that we have the right data and the accurate data to be able to meet the customer’s financial needs as we talk to them and explain how the bank can help them in their financial journeys.

BAN: What’s something your IT team would be surprised to learn about you?

AV: An interesting fact is that I’m a mechanical engineer by trade and my first job outside of college was working for a mining company. I have been on a really exciting journey from going up the mountainside for opencast mining into leading a technology division for a bank, actually. And I’ve really enjoyed the journey so far.

BAN: What technology projects are you focused on now?

AV: A lot of our focus is to make sure we have a very robust, both internal and external, API ecosystem. We are spending a lot of effort on automating our release cycles. So from a continuous integration perspective, that is an ongoing activity. And … automation, we mentioned about our contact center and employee experience. So those will continue as well, as we find other use cases for extending our robotic process automation capabilities in those areas.

We want to make sure that most of our applications have a continuous delivery capability in terms of how we release code and how we build code, so that would add a significant amount of automation for … how we build and deploy systems.

BAN: What’s your favorite piece of leadership advice?

AV: One piece that stands out — truly been transformational for me personally — is moving my leadership style from being an execution-driven leader to a leader who puts the people first. Changing actually, because the way we deliver outcomes can also be delivered better if we enable the people around us, so that change was transformational for me personally. It has allowed me to build great teams and scale up to meet some really transformational programs across three of the banks that I’ve worked at as an IT leader.

Honestly, we are in a very people-focused business. And our success as a company completely depends upon having a very highly engaged and empowered team. So the key element in the center versus driving to outcomes is the shift that has been really transformational for me.