BMO Financial Group is betting on its partnership with Google to be a “growth engine” for the company from a U.S. geographic perspective, Chief Digital Officer Brett Pitts told Bank Innovation.

Last week, Google announced partnerships with eight U.S. financial institutions to launch digital bank accounts in 2021 that can be managed through Google Pay. In addition to BMO, Google is partnering with BankMobile, BBVA USA, Citi, Coastal Community Bank, First Independence Bank, as well as Stanford Federal Credit Union and SEFCU.

BMO’s U.S. operations under BMO Harris operate more than 500 branches in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota and Missouri. During the past year, BMO has been broadly extending its digital strategies, especially around retail banking and deposits, to stretch beyond its physical footprint, Pitts said. BMO Harris’ fintech accelerator funnels new technologies to the bank’s suite of products; in the past year the bank has launched a personal loan assessment tool for its mobile app, and a photo-based autopay feature that allows customers to pay bills via email. The Google partnership will allow the bank to “accelerate that kind of growth.”

“We’re going to have the opportunity to talk with, and make the case for, a BMO relationship with a whole host of customers who we might not normally talk with — and that’s what we’re in the process of working through with Google right now,” Pitts said.

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Google will oversee the design of the user interface of the new digital bank accounts while BMO will provide the back-end banking infrastructure, something Pitts said shouldn’t need much tweaking. “This is a model that we’ve been building strategies around and working on with a variety of partners, so we’re already on track to essentially open up many of the elements of the back end of what we do through technology like microservices and API layers to make it easier to securely share data with a whole host of different providers as the open banking model continues to evolve,” he said.

BMO’s collaborative approach to banking services has accelerated as customers increasingly expect digital finance experiences.
“Customers for a while have been pushing the model from a digital finance perspective into all sorts of different apps, providers and different ways of looking at their financial information,” Pitts said. “But also realizing that, even as customers spend more time with us on our digital properties … 95%-plus of the time they’re spending on digital they are not with their bank.” As a result, BMO has put prioritized the different avenues — and partners — through which the bank can deliver its value to customers, he said.

BMO Harris Bank’s parent company, BMO Financial Group, has CA$987 billion ($739 billion) of assets and more than 12 million customers across personal and commercial banking, wealth management and investment services. BMO’s (NYSE:BMO) share price closed at $57.37 today on the NYSE.