BMO is to transfer large portions of its commercial and investment banking operations to Amazon Web Services in an effort to streamline its internal business processes and develop new customer-facing applications.
With over 12 million customers and $950 billion in assets, BMO is the eighth-largest bank in North America.
The selection of AWS as its preferred cloud provider is part of a major digital transformation drive that will enable BMO to tap into an extensive portfolio of cloud capabilities, including analytics, machine learning, serverless, compute, storage, and database.
BMO is moving strategic workloads to AWS that support its retail and commercial banking, investment banking, and wealth management operations. The bank is also migrating its online and mobile banking applications to AWS to innovate faster, setting up an operating model that will include the creation of a consolidated data lake and the deployment of serverless high-performance computing and machine learning.
As part of its move to personalise services, the bank is also using Amazon Connect to provide a more customer-centric experience for its call centre, as well as to support remote working capabilities for employees.
To prepare its workforce for the switchover, BMO will launch a comprehensive, hands-on cloud skills training program for its non-technical and IT employees.
Steve Tennyson, BMO's chief technology and operations officer, says: “AWS gives us the reliable global infrastructure we need to rapidly scale our business, as well as the comprehensive set of cloud capabilities to move faster and expand the use of analytics, machine learning, and high-performance computing across our entire operation.”