BMO names Wells Fargo veteran as first chief digital officer

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Bank of Montreal has carved out a new role to lead its digital modernization and plucked a senior executive from U.S. bank Wells Fargo & Co. to fill it.

Brett Pitts will become BMO's first chief digital officer on Nov. 30, overseeing the bank's digital initiatives across North America.

Over a 17-year career with Wells Fargo, Mr. Pitts rose through the ranks of the bank's digital channels group. He most recently served as executive vice-president and group head of digital for Wells Fargo, a bank that has lately struggled under added scrutiny from scandals over some if its sales practices and seen top talent depart.

The creation of a new digital chief at BMO marks one of the first senior-level hires since Darryl White took over as BMO new chief executive officer at the start of November. Mr. White has signalled his desire to boost the bank's spending on technology and speed up a transformation that is streamlining its branch network and launching new mobile banking products to suit customers' changing preferences.

In a recent interview, Mr. White said the rate of digital adoption among Canadian customers is currently 51 per cent, but he expects that number to climb above 70 per cent in the near future.

The new role puts Mr. Pitts in charge of a portfolio that will be crucial to any bank's future. Some rival banks already have executives with similar job titles in place. And like all banks, BMO will be faced with hard choices about how tightly it wants to embrace new technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, which offer the promise of greater speed and lower costs, but also threaten to upend existing business models.

"Brett is known for his deep industry expertise and for delivering innovative digital banking solutions," Cameron Fowler, who was recently promoted to president of North American personal and business banking, said in a prepared statement.

BMO was the first of Canada's big banks to launch a robo-adviser with the 2016 launch of BMO SmartFolio, an online investing platform built in-house. Since then, it has begun rolling out a suite of incremental digital tools to help customers do more day-to-day banking online.