BMO Harris Bank selected FIS to modernize its banking platform with the aim of giving U.S. customers access to a range of mobile-first deposit and checking accounts.

The multi-year rollout will transform $157 billion BMO Harris’s core banking systems to support the bank’s growth plans in the U.S., the company announced today.

Atul Verma, chief information officer, US, personal and business banking at BMO Financial Group, told Bank Automation News that the new FIS cloud-native banking platform will also allow for easier product rollouts and promote operational efficiencies.

The new long-term agreement with technology solutions provider FIS will include the FIS modern banking platform, Digital One, the Code Connect application programming interface (API) gateway, and a range of call center, card production, and back-office managed services.

Rob Lee, executive vice president of digital and core banking solutions at FIS, told BAN, “We design the platform from the ground up. Like all other vendors, we’ve incrementally enhanced our solutions over time, and, if you think about it from a bank’s perspective, the ability to launch new products, to launch new business models, to be very flexible and adapt to those new models, that’s first and foremost. And that wasn’t something that our legacy technology or any legacy technology necessarily supported well.”

The cloud-native solution’s APIs are built first, allowing the bank to orchestrate those APIs in a way that fits the bank’s business processes. “You’re not bound to a legacy business model,” Lee said.

FIS currently provides BMO Harris Bank’s core banking and payments solutions, and the new rollout represents an extension of that original agreement. Lee noted that the implementation is a natural evolution for the bank given the need for next generation open banking solutions that are digital first and flexible in terms of supporting multiple business models.

“Many of the core providers, ourselves included, came from a legacy position—that we supported banks as they existed for many, many years, and, of course, now as you know there are many models, too many models to count,” he said.

While there is no set date for the completion of the rollout, Verma told BAN that BMO Harris Bank is mindful of the implementation challenges of deploying any new automation. “We are very risk conscious about how we go about doing it,” he added. “Our first foray into the platform will likely be mobile-only accounts, sometime later this year, so that could be the start of the journey that will build up from there.”

Verma added that the real time native nature of the new FIS platform will be a huge benefit for the bank, reducing back-office inefficiencies due to batch processing and manual steps related to business processes. He added that the rollout is “exciting for our developer community as well, to work with a more modern platform and be innovative around it.”

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