Meet Katie Oresar, BMO's new U.S. payments sales head

• Key insights: Katie Oresar, BMO's U.S. head of treasury and payment solutions sales, spoke with American Banker about her priorities leading a new team, the importance of organic mentorship and what clients are asking for in their payments services.
• What's at stake: The pace of change is accelerating quickly, and it's going to be important for payments companies to be nimble and pivot quickly, Oresar told American Banker.
• Forward look: "The future of payments is going to be about speed, intelligence and connectivity," she said.  

Like many banks, BMO is putting a ton of emphasis on its commercial treasury management and payment solutions business as it looks to cement its standing as the go-to payments provider for commercial banks and commercial clients. Katie Oresar, the bank's new U.S. head of treasury and payment solution sales, is ready for the challenge. 

"What excites me about treasury and payment solution sales in the context of BMO's broader goals is that BMO overall has a very aggressive growth strategy, and treasury and payments are at the heart of that growth strategy," Oresar told American Banker. "We've come out and said our goal is to really redefine commercial banking across the U.S. banking landscape." 

Oresar joined BMO in September after spending more than two decades at JPMorgan Payments, and now runs a national sales team that spans across the country and is responsible for any product that a commercial bank or corporation might use to send or receive money, including cash management products, card products and merchant acquiring, to name a few. 

Oresar spoke with American Banker about her priorities leading a new team, the importance of organic mentorship and what clients are asking for in their payments services. 

What follows is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity.

What are your top priorities in your new role?

KATIE ORESAR: My priority is to build a really collaborative, purpose-driven team that works hand in hand with our banking partners and feels empowered to act. I want us to bring fresh energy to how BMO shows up for our clients from a treasury perspective. 

The payment space is continuing to evolve, and that creates a huge opportunity for us to just be that advisor for our clients and for prospective clients. They're looking for guidance, and they want to hear best practices and learn where they can gain efficiency. 

What are your clients asking for? 

Oresar: If you ask any number of companies, people are trying to do more with less resources. 

Clients want to be more automated. They want to be more efficient. That's where we feel like we can really add value. 

We're focused on meeting clients where they are. We invest in digital tools, embedded finance – again, back to having that kind of one-stop shop – and data-driven insights to help our clients really solve problems. We want to make treasury and payments simpler, smarter and more seamlessly integrated into a company's business operations.  

Looking ahead to the future of payments, it's going to be about speed, intelligence and connectivity. Historically, payments have been viewed as transactional – a means to an end, "I need to use these products to be able to make my payments and receive payments from my customers." Going forward, we look at it really as a strategic enabler for growth, for both the bank, but really for our clients as well. 

The payments space is continuing to evolve, and that pace of change will only accelerate over time. And so it's going to be really important to be able to be nimble and pivot quickly. 

I run a sales organization, but my strongest partner internally is on the product side. I partner very, very closely with product and sales enablement, and that will give us the flexibility to innovate, whether that's collaborating with fintechs – that is obviously a key piece to any bank strategy today – or, in some cases, developing our own technology right to continue to evolve as well. 

How are BMO's clients using artificial intelligence for treasury management?

As it relates to client interaction, where we really are seeing it today is from an insights perspective, using client activity and how they're working with the bank to go to them to have very targeted recommendations around, 'Here's how we think you could do this better here.' 

Turning to leadership, what is the best career advice you've ever received? 

The best career advice I've received is to get out of your comfort zone. You need a board of directors of people who are going to really push you to do things that you may not have thought of yourself. 

We can get into tunnel vision around what our career path looks like, and you need those people who will challenge you and say, 'Hey, have you thought about this?' 

It's also really important for people to develop mentorship relationships naturally. We try to force mentorship relationships sometimes, but I think the ones that develop organically – when you have people that you have a connection with, to really foster those relationships over the course of your career –  can be very valuable when you come to a crossroads in your career, you want to make a decision. You want those people who have that unbiased view and that will give you a really honest perspective. 

What challenges do young people face coming into the payment or sales industry now, and what is your advice to overcome those challenges? 

In this world that we live in, where there's a lot of social media and you're communicating over email, people can lose the ability to connect with people in an effective manner.

At the end of the day, banking, treasury, sales, those are all relationship businesses. So, continue to hone those skills of being able to develop those relationships in person and have that in-person connectivity. 

Those in-person interactions are crucial. At the end of the day, people want to do business with people that they like and they trust, and you really can't foster those kinds of solid foundations of a relationship without interacting with people in person.