BMO Business Xpress (BBX)

Result

Small-business lending moved from up to 30 days to about 20 minutes on average—$1 billion in new loans in the first six weeks, 4,500+ businesses in year one.

Role

Product Designer & UI Developer · BMO Bank of Montreal · 2018

My contribution (IC): product design and UI development on BMO Business Xpress—user flows, prototype, UAT iteration, and platform implementation work alongside research and business partners.

Team effort: Discovery, coast-to-coast specialist research, legal/business automation decisions, and platform launch were collaborative. Outcomes below are product/platform results, not a personal quota.

Emily couldn’t win a 30-day race

Emily is a small-business banking specialist in downtown Toronto. Same long process for every ask (including a site visit), manual financial math she double-checked constantly, 12 internal and external systems, and credit-officer back-and-forth—while competitors funded in days. Losing deals hit clients and her incentive-tied livelihood.

Goal from the bank: simplify lending to 30 minutes, usable by branch employees without special training.

Shadow the expert, then cut what legal and business allow

We shadowed a lending expert for two days and mapped specialist and customer journeys. We partnered with business and legal to see what could be automated or removed. Focus groups and usability tests with specialists coast to coast asked what to automate, whether calculation visuals made sense, what client info mattered before starting, top loan reasons, and whether save-and-return was essential.

One guided flow instead of twelve systems

1. Search

Find or create the small-business customer.

2. Client Profile

Relevant data pulled from those back-end systems.

3. Application Dashboard

Save and resume.

4. Analyze Needs

Capture reasons; recommend products.

5. Review Financials

Automate Authorized Limit Update and guarantor Personal Net Worth.

6. Configure Products

Adjust recommendations from the real conversation.

7. Success

Send to fulfillment for automatic processing.

Prototype → UAT → design changes → platform implementation.

Outcomes

Attributed to BMO Business Xpress as shipped—not to a single IC.

• $1 billion in new loans in the first six weeks
• ~20 minutes average time to process an application
• 4,500+ businesses served in the first year

Why this mattered

Small businesses often can’t wait a month for capital. Speeding the specialist’s path protected BMO’s relationships and made lending something more employees could run without a specialist-only maze.

Learnings

• Time-to-yes is the product: every manual calc and system hop is a competitive loss.
• Save-and-return wasn’t a nice-to-have—specialists leave applications mid-flight.
• Automate the math specialists feared getting wrong; keep judgment where the customer conversation lives (configure products).

One thing that did not work

Keeping the same heavyweight process for every funding amount—including a business visit—while competitors funded in days. Research and business/legal partnership existed to strip or automate steps; clinging to one monolithic path was the failure mode BBX replaced.