Maja Neable on Bringing Humanity Back to Banking
Maja is the Chief Marketing Officer, North American Personal and Business Banking at BMO. She has been with BMO for 5 years, first leading digital marketing and now as a CMO. Maja enjoys working with inspiring teams across the organization to deliver innovative marketing and great customer experience strategies. She is a digital-savvy executive with over 20 years of experience, including sales & service leadership, digital design & product development, and business & brand strategy. Maja holds a BMath degree from the University of Waterloo, and an MBA from IMD, Switzerland.
What is your day-to-day like and is there anything exciting that you’re currently working on?
Every day brings a new challenge for our customers. At BMO, we focus on being there for them in their new normal, whatever that may mean. This may mean reaching out to check in on them, providing new mobile & online tools/resources to help our customers with their financial lives, or building products/services that are relevant for today.
We know that 70–80% of Canadians are in some way anxious about their finances — they worry about their ability to get ahead and stay ahead financially. They worry about their ability to make real financial progress. And we, as a bank that’s based on humanity, take customer focus as our guiding principle in everything that we do.
There are a few new experiences that we have put out for our customers. The first one is the BMO Family Bundle. It helps our customers make real financial progress by allowing their family members to enjoy no-fee daily banking with all the benefits and privacy of separate chequing accounts. That’s one monthly fee for one household, which makes saving money a lot easier. You may have seen some of our recent advertising around this, featuring our spokesperson. That advertising is a part of a larger BMO brand set of campaigns. These ads are focused on showcasing how BMO helps its customers in very real, human ways. In fact, this work has earned a Gold CMA Award. In total BMO won 9 CMA awards, 5 were gold — so a lot to be proud of!
The second example is the BMO Eclipse Visa Infinite Card. This card is perfect for today’s way of living — it rewards customers with 5x the points for the everyday purchases that they’re making these days, like groceries and takeout. In addition to that, it looks amazing, so one day when you are able to go out to a restaurant with your friends and show off your card, it’s something that you’d probably want to put on the table! This new design is something we’re very proud of. We have thoughtfully designed the full experience — from the unboxing to the customers activating their cards and updated digital capabilities with more rewards.
This year, in order to help our small businesses, we have launched a podcast series called Business Unplanned, hosted by Michael Hyatt. Michael speaks with entrepreneurs about their hardships, the lessons they’ve learned, and how to plan during times of crisis.
What are some trends you are noticing right now within marketing for financial services?
Number one is the need to react in an instant to the shift in the customer’s lives; this has been the theme of everything that we do. We revisited our marketing processes to be more agile — shifting from 3–6 months to build out a comprehensive campaign, to putting things out in the market in a couple of days. And we’ve found new ways to reach our customers — such as having our Contact Centre Agents, from the safety of their homes, film videos to explain the different programs we’re offering to our customers.
Another trend is the changing customer expectation driving us to create more personalized experiences, across multiple channels. Most organizations that have been around for a while have seen this evolution from one-size-fits-all, to campaigns, to segments, to now 1–1 personalized experiences. This is a complex and multi-faceted journey, but a fun one to be part of.
What is keeping you up at night right now?
The well-being of our customers certainly keeps us up at night. Finances are such an important part of our customers’ lives and we provide so much of the backbone of our society as a financial service, alongside our peer banks.
When we hear some of the stories about what’s going on in our customer’s lives, they are heartbreaking. That’s where the humanity of BMO really comes through, focusing on how we best support our customers in using our digital services as much as possible for all their banking needs and how we connect with customers in digital channels, over a video, over the phone, or with safe access to branches.
Beyond our current environment, something else that’s keeping me and many CMOs up at night is the ability to really understand the impact of investments. Gone are the days when marketers could say, “I’m wasting half my money; I just don’t know which half.” With mixed media modeling tools, we can better understand how specific marketing tactics are driving results. The important thing for me, as a CMO, is to strike the right balance between how much we invest in these types of tools, vs. how much we invest in our actual media & marketing communications. My team loves combining data and creativity in our decision-making.
Can you elaborate more on the usage of data and how it relates to the ever-evolving consumer identity? How are you handling that?
I think #1 is creating a 360-degree view of our customers. And that’s both internally, understanding every part of a customer’s relationship with us; and externally, bringing together various insights into a comprehensive view. At BMO, we’re lucky to have infrastructure that enables us to bring together that internal view of our customers. When it comes to the external piece, I don’t think anyone has really solved how to best tie in various sources of insights into a comprehensive view. There are so many pieces of information — research, reports, specific personalized journeys — that all need to be tied together in a meaningful way to provide even greater customer experiences. The winners will be those players that are able to harvest this power of data.
At the same time, with the data we do have — it’s critical to review and question the notions of well-established insights. Customers and their expectations are changing every day, and so we need to constantly question what remains relevant to them.
While crafting strategies around implementing an exciting and personalized digital experience for your customers, what is calling them to BMO?
We have a test & learn approach in all our marketing. That continuous learning is important to us — it keeps the teams energized and we find our customers respond to it very well. We engage our customers to learn how we can continually create better experiences for them.
The second thing customers respond well to is an integrated experience across channels. Creating that seamless connection across digital, contact centers, and branches help the customer feel that we truly know them and that it’s effortless to engage with us regardless of channel.
Through all this we are staying true to our core: We’re the bank with the human touch — humans first, bankers second.
We know from customer feedback that they feel we really understand them as humans and that we go above & beyond their initial questions to dig into what’s going on in their daily lives. Putting humanity first always goes a long way, and it’s certainly something we’re very proud of at BMO.
How do you think emerging technology is going to play a role in the development and evolution of finance as a whole?
The concept of open banking is certainly something that’s not only coming our way, but it’s here. I think we’ll continue to see more open banking partnerships aimed at delivering those integrated customer experiences in a consistent manner. There are a few bright spotlights where companies can showcase how great those integrated experiences are, but I would say the industry is still far away from best-in-class here. Technology will be the key to getting us there — and then it’ll become a question of how the legacy systems of banks that have been around for 200+ years evolve to support this. It is exciting to be part of that evolution.
Do you have any last words or closing remarks or are there any topics that you think the public needs more awareness around?
I personally find marketing to be so exciting because it’s this beautiful blend of the left and right brain — with data driving better customer experiences & marketing, and at the same time needing to dive into real human understanding and creativity.
While it’s a difficult time, there’s never been a better time to be in marketing. It’s exciting to see how marketing continues to evolve with the ever-changing technology and the availability of data for us to learn from.
