BMO Powers Digital First Strategy to Drive Efficiency and Deliver Best-in-Class Customer Experiences with Dynatrace

As one of North America’s largest banks, BMO has adopted a digital first strategy to power financial progress and continually meet the needs of its customers in a rapidly evolving market. The strategy is centered around technology-led innovation that delivers reimagined banking services and drives best-in-class customer experiences while optimizing operating efficiencies. This helps to free up scarce human resources, enabling employees to focus on delivering expert advice and strategic innovation. Through these initiatives, BMO aims to drive enhanced systems availability and business growth while enhancing customer loyalty.

To support this, BMO relies on a hybrid technology stack spanning on-premises data centers and public cloud services. This allows it to retain security over its most sensitive data and applications, while leveraging the economies of scale of the cloud. To support its teams’ ability to resolve issues, optimize customers’ digital journeys, and personalize their banking experiences, BMO wanted to unlock real-time insights from the enormous volume and variety of observability data being produced across this dynamic and distributed technology stack. However, traditional approaches to log analytics would make it difficult to access timely insights and create a productivity drain due to the reliance on time-consuming manual processes.

BMO needed a more automated solution with AI capabilities that would enable its teams to surface real-time insights that can be used to drive innovation and boost trust. After evaluating the market, BMO identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs, due to its Grail™ data lakehouse. The ability to store all observability data in context and conduct log analytics near instantaneously and at scale with Grail made Dynatrace the ideal solution.

“To enable our digital-first strategy and deliver speed, innovation, and efficiency, we needed to minimize the disruption caused by system issues or downtime,” said Rohan Shah, Senior Manager for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), BMO. “The combined power of Dynatrace’s Grail and its causal and predictive AI capabilities has enabled our team to fully embrace the principles of SRE and respond with record speed when issues occur, by allowing us to quickly understand what’s happening in our systems.”

• Increased customer trust and loyalty: With the AI-powered answers underpinned by Grail, BMO has dramatically improved the speed at which its teams can identify and respond to issues in the digital customer journey. This has helped BMO’s teams to dramatically reduce Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) issues, and slashed root cause analysis (RCA) time by 80%. As a result, BMO can provide continuous service availability for the customers and communities it serves, helping to drive greater trust and loyalty.
• More reliable banking: Manual log analytics processes that previously took BMO’s teams up to 45 minutes now take 5 seconds with Dynatrace. This has eliminated around 60 hours of manual toil every month per team and enabled dramatic improvements in how quickly the teams can diagnose and act on an issue. This approach is being shared and reused across BMO’s Technology, Resiliency, and Experience Operations team, to support its wider efforts to deliver consistent banking services.
• Faster innovation with lower risk: Dynatrace provides a perfect platform to support SRE practices and facilitate experimentation that will help BMO to deliver on its digital first strategy. With the real-time answers from Dynatrace’s Grail and the platform’s AI capabilities, BMO’s teams can quickly understand issues associated with changes or new services they introduce and instantly roll back if they need to, enabling a faster pace of innovation with reduced risk. This capability has also freed up approximately 40 hours of additional time for each team every month, so they can focus on driving innovation rather than reacting to problems.
• Greater operational efficiency: Dynatrace’s ecosystem integrations have opened the door for BMO to accelerate its journey towards a self-healing applications strategy to drive further efficiency. BMO is looking to route the data-backed answers from Grail into an ITSM solution to automatically generate support tickets with information on the root cause embedded and send them to the relevant team to act on. The goal is to use this approach to trigger an automated workflow to resolve the issue without the need for any manual intervention.

“In a complex technological environment, it’s very easy for a sudden change to cause things to break,” continued Shah. “Dynatrace has enabled us to dramatically reduce this timeframe through near-instant identification of an issue and its root cause. Dynatrace is invaluable in BMO’s journey to become a data-driven organization, harnessing unified observability and powerful AI capabilities to accelerate innovation and deliver flawless digital experiences.”