BMO sees opportunities in agriculture and chatbots
Claude Gagnon, the Bank of Montreal’s president for Quebec, says making decisions locally is important.
While the bank may have moved its operational head office to Toronto in 1977, it maintains a strong presence in its namesake city and many decisions for the local market are still made in Montreal, said Gagnon, who became the Quebec president this spring.
“The financial market in Quebec is quite different from the rest of Canada,” he said.
A handful of smaller competitors are based in Quebec and have their staff — and customers — concentrated here.
While he said markets are competitive, Quebec sometimes requires a unique approach.
And as Montreal and Quebec become more attractive to business, BMO is seeing new opportunities in the province, Gagnon said.
One area where the bank sees big opportunities is agribusiness, said Mario Rigante, a senior vice-president at BMO’s Quebec division.
It’s a sector where local market knowledge is particularly important.
“The agri business in Quebec is different than in the rest of Canada. There are smaller farmers here, consolidation is not as rampant as in the rest of the country,” Rigante said.
That local market knowledge is particularly important in rural areas.
“When it’s Montreal, it’s easy, everyone knows Montreal, but when you’re in Matane, when you’re in Rimouski,” he said, “that doesn’t mean as much to someone who’s not in Quebec.”
As one of Quebec’s oldest industries attracts the bank’s attention, so is one of Quebec’s newest.
Artificial intelligence is starting to play a role in the way the bank interacts with customers. Chatbots on Twitter and Facebook can now answer about 300 of the most common questions the bank’s call centres get.
But behind the scenes, training the bots and filling the gaps are people.
About one-third of BMO’s 3,000 call-centre employees are based in Montreal.
In order to ensure there are always enough call-centre workers on duty to serve francophone customers in French, the bank hires bilingual workers in Montreal, said François Hudon, the head of the bank’s North American Customer Contact Centre.
Some of those workers are working with the chatbots.
“We know why customers call, we know what customers need on an ongoing basis, so our job is to train the bot and my employees actually sit behind the bot and watch the interactions with customers and when a customer jumps in and asks the bot a question we have not yet trained the bot or the bot has not yet understood the exact words of the question, we jump in,” Hudon said.
While it is still early days, Hudon sees a lot of potential for this type of technology.
Chatbots aren’t going to be giving people advice about a mortgage, but “they’ll start a process, they’ll start an application and that’s when we’ll be able to put humans in a much higher-value kind of interaction with the customer,” he said. “We do talk about chatbots as virtual assistants for customers. They will ultimately be virtual assistants for our employees.”