Lawrence Wan, chief architect, says, "BMO is committed to delivering a great customer experience. By that we mean that doing business with us is easier, simpler, and perfectly tailored to individual needs."

Vice President of Customer Analytics Gayle Ramsay explains the challenges: "As digital marketing and social media have become more important, our customers are expecting us to know them in real time. We wanted the capability to serve them and provide relevant offers whether they interacted with us in a branch, through a call center, or in digital space."

To obtain needed capabilities, BMO used TIBCO solutions to provide real-time information, identify key incidents, simplify and automate processes, and create data visualizations for more efficient decision-making on how best to serve customers. "We formed a partnership with TIBCO, based on its expertise and especially its industry domain experience," says Wan.

BMO now connects all customer channels to all products and services across all lines of business. “We use real-time event processing to trigger actions based on the right events, so our response to customers is relevant,” says Wan. “Using TIBCO solutions, we now cut through large volumes of data and glean insights in a much more timely manner.

"With TIBCO automated BPM workflows and resource assignment, we've dramatically shortened approval times for commercial lending and mortgage approvals. We also use TIBCO solutions to interface to the integration platform and facilitate straight-through processing. We consistently see 30 to 50 percent reductions in time to market for our business process automations, and we're able to reduce integration costs by 40 to 50 percent. We now have robust, agile, highly scalable, and continuously available integration and real-time event processing."

BMO's combination of customer past history and real-time data and decision-making has resulted in fast payback. "We can identify when a customer has done something significant and respond," says Ramsay. "Payback from real-time relevant offers was triple our investment costs."

TIBCO event processing helps inform interactions, even when initiated through a new channel. "Using real-time Clickstream data, plus data on past behavior, we can see things like an abandoned product application,” says Ramsay. "We pick that up, and it doesn't just go back into the online channel, so we're really understanding the whole picture. If that customer calls into a call center or walks into a branch, agents know what happened before. They can deal with the current situation and then move onto new sales areas."

By providing more relevant and timely offers, acceptance has improved. "Instead of offers that are months old, they are now recent and could be based on interactions that occurred just minutes before—so they are very relevant for that customer," says Ramsay. "We've seen positive acceptance triple from what it was four years ago. We've moved from a one day response time to near real time."

Results also include better teller sales performance. "Our teller performance improved when we provided relevant timely offers. We give tellers an easy way to understand the customer and present offers. It lets them feel comfortable, and now they make offers more often, basically going from only 5 percent of the time to now more than 60 percent of the time,” Ramsay says.

Customer satisfaction and being proactive was a key goal for the bank. "In the past, we tended to be more reactive to customer needs. If they asked, we would provide it, but now we see that recent trends in our net promoter score (NPS) are trending up," says Ramsay.

Today, we have the capability to do real-time decisioning across call centers, branches, and digital channels," says Ramsay. "Now, we're moving to other channels. Who knows what's next? The TIBCO interface will allow us to connect to it." Adds Wan, "With our strong TIBCO foundation, we'll be able to continue to provide great IT capabilities to support the business and customer experience.”