relationship banker

banker

analyst

associate

anti money laundering analyst

BMO US

BMO Harris Bank, is a large bank in the Central Nothern part of the country and of course Canada. They have started to branch out in the sunbelt area(Florida and Arizona) they have been in the banking business for over 130 years and have not since upgraded their technology. Software and technology is super slow you have to entertain customers often so they do not grow impatient as it's very common as it's apologizing for it. More accounts are closed daily then opened, since they are not competive enough and have very few locations not providing enough atms and making it an incovenience to customers. If it was not for it's "snowbirds" customers and the drive-thru this bank would seize to exists in the south, it would not be a surprise if it once again sold or merged like it did with it's Orlando,Fla branches. This not an opportunity growth nor does it embrace minorities type of employement.

You will be also accountable for referring prospects to Personal Bankers and other groups at least 15 to 20 outbound calls per day and at least getting one small business accounts. 

There are unrealistic goals to try to meet you can work on referrals but at the end of the day, "cheeks in the seat" is all that mattters according to management that is very incompetent and selfish.

Providing professional, courteous and friendly customer service, greeting all customers promptly and pleasant is not hard to do most customers are very friendly.

Support professional bank image by ensuring care for the branch environment and appearance of the branch as well as personal appearance is something management does not take serious with their revealing attire and hair colors.

Performing other administrative tasks as needed, is not an option but if you ask management for sick time or vacation dates if you do not meet their needs first most likey it will not happen.

This is a sales oriented job you will need to identify customer needs and matches needs with appropriate product or service, utilizing opportunities to suggest or cross-sell other bank products and services. 

If goals are not met or exceeded all personal referral goals as defined, management instead of assisting you they will place more pressure then assistance. 

This bank’s community involvement and participation is only required for certain people meaning when you assist a community activity no else will be there. 

Few pros are the customer relationships. 

Do not expect much from either co-workers and management. If you ever encounter HR issues you are better off resigning only the higher positons get assitance in any matters.

This is a very "whitewashed" bank regardless of personal performance and development, will not make any differnce to minorities trying to seek growth within the company. 

At BMO Harris Bank, passionate individuals with eventually slowly diminish the passion began with. They will only stand behind your success but when other issues arise no one will be there to show the support you need to turn your potential into performance.

Identify, monitor, recommend and execute action on non-performing accounts. Must balance financial risks/rewards to Bank with working with and meeting the needs of the customer. Objective is to minimize loss and/or maximize return on investment through prompt and appropriate loss mitigation. Utilize strong negotiation skills and interpersonal skills, while adhering to all applicable guidelines, requirements and regulations. Maintain contact and follow-through to ensure appropriate resolution.

Non-Performing Account Resolution (60%)
• Analyze varying customer issues/inquiries and non-performing accounts to determine appropriate solutions
• Contact past due customers and execute established procedures for the successful resolution of non-performing accounts, adhering to all applicable investor guidelines, requirements and regulations
• Respond to past-due customer-initiated requests and work with customer to resolve delinquency in a manner beneficial to all parties
• Negotiate the delinquent account resolution by balancing the financial risks/rewards to the bank with working with and meeting the needs of the customer
• Apply skip tracing techniques and strong negotiation skills when required
• Keep management apprised of complex or high risk situations or issues
• Build and maintain constructive relationships with internal and external business partners, suppliers, vendors and regulatory officials
• Stay abreast of and incorporate changing regulations and procedures and ensure compliance

Monitoring and Follow-up (40%)
• Maintain accurate and timely information and records in Bank systems
• Analyze pertinent reports and function-specific data/metrics to identify delinquencies, default, foreclosure and other non-performing accounts
• Provide courteous and timely follow-up to calls and correspondence.
• Monitor proceedings in accordance with bank policies and applicable state and federal laws and guidelines
• Maintain contact with past due customers throughout resolution process to ensure appropriate follow-through and resolution
•	Release Department 

Responsible for obtaining the customers files for the mortgage pay offs, release the mortgage copy as well with BMO letter head, Mail to customer.

Title Department-
•	Responsible for returned titles, Enter into Third party vendors systems, 
•	Responsible for maintaining All titles and matching VINs in third party systems
•	Responsible for filing, faxing, and mailing all title release requests per TPSS.

I have worked in both the Retail and Mortgage divisions of BMO bank for 6 years. Their is a great deal of truthful information within the reviews of this company that are not to be considered written out of spite. The retail division of the Midwest has condensed in number of branches, employee base and clientele since expanding out of Metro Chicago. It would be beneficial to consider much of the info contained within the Indeed reviews before exploring employment with this company. As a retail employer you are going to be required to have 20 face to face interactions that generate a product lead regardless if you served 2 clients on that business day. All retail bankers will also need 50 voice to voice "cold calls" per week and that does not include "call night" which requires cold calling after hours. The barrage of solicitation the clientele receives whether at the bankers desk, at the drive up or at home by phone is disheartening. BMO seems to have a business model that is based on a theory of , too ignorant to recognize successful strategies of its competitors and too arrogant to do so. Each acquisition of another financial lender has lead to an enormous loss of client base and employee positions, while the competition increases market share as a direct result of this "business attitude".  The mortgage dept suffers from the same business approach in that the agenda is set on a metro Chicago model without any economic consideration to individual market strategy. The area mortgage directors are aware the shortcomings of pricing, processing and lack of realtor/vendor willingness to engage BMO's mortgage line, but are powerless to effect any change. The lifeblood of mortgage coincides with the purchase of homes. A mortgage originator at BMO should not expect a realtor to invest their clientele in an bank that has a higher price point and most importantly, a processing/underwriting procedure that is very inefficient for all parties involved. The employee base is very nice but sadly turns over so quickly that employee moral and customer service is compromised. It is truly the one Bank that I could never go back to since resigning. The management has done nothing positive, in light of declining numbers, that is positive for its employees and or most importantly it's clientele.  :(

First off I wanted to said I would give the experience a one star, if it not for the coworker I worked with. The technologies are ancient, and in order to do different things you need to go to multiple system and sometimes those system doesn't work either. If you need further assistance you can call the internal service line, and those guy instead of helping they just tell you where in the procedures to look up, I wanted to call to get further explanation not to back to read the procedures. The managers themselves, don't really know either. Because this bank doesn't have liencese banker at the retail level, except on the premier side, yet some of the managers want us to call ourselves financial consultants or advisors. But the overall goal is the get the customers to buy into debt or new accounts at the end of the day. That is what you gonna be doing pretty every single day, and you happen to meet or beat the sale goal, yes there are sale goal. They will double it to where it impossible for you to get your bonuses, because the pay is average at best. Also they are doing a thing call Bank at Work, that will have you go to the local business like a door to door saleman or cold call those business to schedule event. It basically mean you going to the business to do a presentation as part of the "Financial Education" for their employees, but the goal is for new account. It not working like how they wanted, and the branch managers are too scare to loose their job  to said anything, so instead they manipulate the productions number so it lean toward Bank at Work. They also use hard selling tactic to get people at the presentation to open account on their phone, they over promise while they are doing that, but the system and everything else under delivery when the customer use it. These are just some of the things that going on in these place, there are plenty more but I don't want to write multiple paragraphs. If you are reading this and just got a job with the retail side, be prepared for all this and more, especially if you are new to the industry. 

There are good and bad things about working for BMO Harris. Unfortunately for me, the bad outweighed the good by leaps and bounds. Much of the day was spent doing things unrelated to my actual job. When we did have work to do it was a competition to see who could scatter the fastest. "Lazy" is probably the best adjective to describe the work environment.

If you don't take the initiative you won't learn much, as is true for most jobs. This was especially true for me because my Service Manager was not interested in training or helping employees be their best. My Service Manager was more interested in surfing the internet and completing personal tasks on work time. My Branch Manger(s) were essentially non-existent and unavailable 95% of the time. Training is done entirely online with ineffective Power Point presentations and quizzes you can take a re-take until you pass.

My job title included the word "service" but service is a truly minimal part of this position. Make no mistake about it; this is a SALES JOB. Your worth is determined by how many customers you can convince to open new accounts, credit cards, loans and meet with the Financial Advisor. Cold-calling, disciplinary action and threats of call nights are punishment for not meeting sales goals. If you're a Service Rep you MUST have a stellar referral/hit record to even be considered for what they see as a promotion. Years of service are irrelevant. Education is irrelevant. Sales is the golden ticket.

What I enjoyed about this job were the health benefits and the opportunity to meet new faces and interact with customers unless the customers were coming in to complain about the ridiculous policies and fees the bank charges. Should you choose to work for BMO Harris, prepare yourself to have to adjust to new policies and products frequently. Prepare yourself to have to explain and defend these changes to customers. Prepare for upset customers on a regular basis.

My location, despite being downtown, was extremely slow. On a "busy" day, I'd help maybe 60 people in total during an 8-hour shift, including the drive up. My location was sort of an oddball in that it was ancient (very cool building that also housed different high wealth client employees). One of my coworkers worked at a location by the mall and said their days were nonstop over there. Each person always struggled to meet our sales quotas due to there being few new customers and business runners.
My coworkers kept the place feeling alive so that plus the benefits BMO offered it was worth it for me. I liked how BMO offered pretty much the same benefits package to both full and part-timers. Between all the holidays off and paid for coupled with 2 weeks of paid sick leave and 2 weeks of paid vacation time, it really wasn't that bad of a starter job. BMO also made it a requirement to take at least 5 consecutive days off, which was very nice.   
I was very happy to not get fired during the pandemic and that BMO adapted so I could continue to support my family.  BMO also made it a point to give us extra befits during the pandemic, like extra PTO time to get your vaccine and extra mental health days.
As far as growth, maybe look somewhere else. Unless you're willing to move around a lot and take several years, it's unlikely that you will see a promotion within the first two years. My manager wished he could have made me a lead teller, but regional management didn't see a need for a lead teller at our location. Despite never getting the "official" title unless I moved to a different branch, I was treated by upper management like one and paid like one. I didn't want to leave my branch since they were always understaffed. 

BMO was a wonderful company to work for, but in today's workplace the trend is to move away from having support people on staff. BMO is no different in this regard. Technological advances are making most paper-handling and some face-to-face positions obsolete. The Agile culture is exacerbating the idea that employees are modular and the ideal situation is to hire them for a specific skill-set for a specific period of time. If you are flexible and don't care about being a vested part of a corporation's culture, this new reality is for you.

Daily work was mostly challenging, but mostly in stimulating and positive ways. I learned to use a variety of applications, skills that will transfer to other companies. Upper management was somewhat distant and not always aware of the true scope of our activities, or at least did not put a priority on seeing the full picture. But, when you could engage them, they were responsive.

In later years, the company adopted a "Being BMO" program, which was one of the most positive moves I saw there. Cross-border cultural differences sometimes caused friction between teams, but this program mitigated that issue pretty well. Overall, though, Talent Acquisition did a great screening job, so people hired tended to get along well with others.

The hardest part of the job revolved around process paralysis. Sometimes instructions were unclear or too open to interpretation, and people would get stuck not knowing what to do next. It could take weeks to find an answer to complete a task.

The most enjoyable part of the job was working with all those nice people. There are so many at BMO, whether they were regular employees or contractors.

My tenure of over 15 years at BMO Bank, spread across two different countries, has provided me with a deep insight into the company's evolving dynamics and organizational practices.

Directional Shifts: A recurring challenge at BMO is its tendency to frequently change strategic directions. This can often create a sense of instability and impede the effectiveness of long-term planning.

Hiring Practices and Talent Recognition: A significant and concerning practice at BMO is the preferential hiring of friends and family, which frequently takes precedence over recognizing true talent and skill. This approach has resulted in many individuals occupying positions for which they are not just underqualified but also unfit. This practice, coupled with a strong focus on diversity and inclusion that often overlooks talent and skill, creates a workplace environment that can be challenging for dedicated and skilled professionals.

Team Collaboration: The company's culture is often characterized by a lack of collaboration, with teams working in isolation. This approach hinders the sharing of ideas and overall efficiency, a critical aspect for any thriving organization.

Real Estate and Hybrid Work Environment: Positively, BMO's choice of real estate for its branches and offices is commendable. The company has effectively adapted its workspaces for a hybrid environment, aligning with contemporary workforce needs.

Conclusion: In conclusion, while BMO Bank excels in its adaptive physical work environment, it faces substantial challenges in strategic consistency, equitable talent recognition, and fostering a collaborative culture. These challenges, if addressed, could significantly improve the company's operational effectiveness and employee morale.

I have worked for BMO for 8 years. I started with M&I which was a totally different bank and cared about customers and employees. Now all it is about is getting customers to buy more products from us. They expect huge sales goals and when you don't reach it you get no sales incentive pay.Then the bank manager gets on you for not doing better and tells you to ask every customer to get a credit card or other products. The computer software is so outdated we still have to use a DOS system and our computers lag so bad every day that we have to apologize to customers for the wait when our computer freezes up.  They say there is room for advancement but unless you kiss up to higher management don't count on it! They keep cutting our staff and tell us we need to do more.  But when we get busy with a line no bankers step in to help us. Constant pressure for sales.  That is all management talks about.  They randomly call customers to survey them to find out how their experience was and if the don't rank us with all 10's then you hear it from your boss.  Yet one of the questions is if they would recommended BMO to their friends, which has nothing to do with the service we gave them.  But we are still blamed when they score us low on the bank's bad reputation. But yet customers are complaining about how we give them a sales pitch every time they come to the bank. I have gotten yelled at for this many times. The raise you get once a year is barely .25 cents if you are lucky. I was promoted in my job so I was doing management work,which was suppose to be a nice raise and it took me 3 years of going to my bosses and fighting for it before I actually got paid for all my extra work. Everyone I know who works at BMO has quit or is looking for another job. I am hoping to get out soon. Not worth it!

BMO really could be a wonderful place to work….Coworkers are friendly, customers are typically nice. Benefits package is wonderful. The real issues are more in how things are set up and how those policies play out day to day. 

Company is always changing which is great…. Except they just slap new stuff on top of the old with minimal training- absurd expectations and while they expect constant over-communication from you, they will not do the same on their end. I don’t mind the work,  hours are weird but doable. My issue lies with the way things are set up. It is way more difficult and at times even impossible to actually help my customers with SIMPLE requests. BMO would rather blame the customers for bmo’s outdated and glitchy tech than actually address and fix those issues. All the while management is preaching to us about providing “effortless” experiences on all calls….  

Call takes more than 10 min to complete ? Can’t be doing that. Don’t care that systems eat up 8 min of that time. Your fault for not magically solve customers problem AND upsell them in the remaining 2 min. You only have to navigate through 15+ systems to do it, so, clearly it’s your fault if you can’t.  

Need to go to the bathroom ? Better make it quick. If you’re not back within 2 min your manager might call you on your personal phone to reprimand you. 

Not feeling well and need to call in sick? Sure np- just a DAILY several step process for that.  If you don’t do it right management will blow up your phone asking you why you’re not at work. 

Vacation? Sure- if you’re fast enough and lucky enough to get the days you need/want. And you better make sure you have everything planned over a year in advance because changing it will be a nightmare. 

Honestly for a bank that has been around for OVER 200 YEARS - they really need to get their act together. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Relationship banker 140 salaries reported	$54,260 per year
Banker 98 salaries reported	$46,158 per year
Analyst 13 salaries reported	$80,489 per year
Associate 5 salaries reported	$106,040 per year
Anti money laundering analyst 6 salaries reported	$64,468 per year

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