Peter Poon got his start in his native Hong Kong, co-founding a fintech startup in 2004.
"I had to lug my own servers up the hill, actual physical servers, and we slept in a room with our servers with barely any air conditioning," he recalled. The young co-founders learned that if they hung around outside the right bar at 11:30 at night, they could intercept executives from the Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ after their post-work drinks and convince them to agree to a meeting the next day.
Eventually they were able to raise money and then to sell the business to the 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 a graduate internship with Chase Private Wealth in Asia, Poon learned the value of technology to affect the customer experience and to transform large systems.
In 2007, he returned to Canada, where he had grown up and graduated from the University of Toronto, and became a tech strategy consultant at BMO. It was "just as tech was really changing the game in financial services," he said.
Mobile was still an afterthought. A presentation Poon wrote on the role of mobile experiences in banking made it to the bank's board of directors, and he found himself placed 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 it's only in its seventh year of digital transformation as it claws its way up from the bottom of the national rankings in categories like digital customer experience.
"Now in many of those metrics we're either #1 or fighting for #1 any given day," Poon said.
Five years ago, he started InnoV8, the bank's innovation program. In 2023, Poon redid 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 get rid of 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 have control of their data. "Banking's not the center; you are the center," Poon said. "It's really down to customer satisfaction."
