Fintech
From fintech founder to banking innovator: Peter Poon at BMO
Peter Poon started his business in his native Hong Kong, co-founding a fintech startup in 2004.
“I had to drag my servers up the hill, actual physical servers, and we slept in a room with our servers with almost no air conditioning,” he recalled. The young cofounders learned that if they stood outside the right bar at 11.30pm at night, they could intercept executives from Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ after their after-work drinks and convince them to agree to a meeting the next day.
They eventually managed to raise money and then sell the business to U.K.-based bank Standard Chartered (20 years later, the bank’s systems still contain five lines of the startup’s original code, Poon said).
During an undergraduate internship at Chase Private Wealth in Asia, Poon learned the value of technology in influencing customer experience and transforming large systems.
In 2007 he returned to Canada, where he had grown up and graduated from the University of Toronto, and became a technology strategy consultant at BMO. It happened “right at the time when technology was really changing the rules of the game in financial services,” he said.
The cell phone was still an afterthought. A presentation Poon wrote about the role of mobile experiences in banking made it to the bank’s board of directors, and he found himself in charge of BMO’s nascent mobile banking platform, which he still runs today.
Older than Canada itself, BMO has been around for more than 200 years, but is only in its seventh year of digital transformation and climbing from the bottom of national rankings in categories like digital customer experience.
“Now in a lot of these metrics we’re either No. 1 or we’re fighting for No. 1 every day,” Poon said.
Five years ago he started InnoV8, the bank’s innovation programme. In 2023, Poon remade BMO’s digital banking platform and worked on a savings goal manager, the Same Day Grace program to help customers avoid overdraft fees, and an AI-powered subscription finder to eliminate unwanted subscriptions and other recurring payments, eliminating 90,000 calls to the bank’s customer service center.
The next opportunity in banking, he said, is open banking, where customers are in control of their own data. “Banking is not the center; you are the center,” Poon said. “It really comes down to customer satisfaction.”