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TORONTO – ATB Financial's new chief executive officer has a tough job to follow
On Tuesday, Curtis Stange is the first day at the helm after the retirement of President and Chief Executive Officer. ATB Financial, at the end of June.
Mowat helped spur technological innovation at Alberta's bank – the only bank in Canada that is also a state-owned company – to track, and sometimes outperform, Bay's largest financial institutions Street in Canada.
Technology Continues to Reshape Financial Services Major Canadian banks have increased their spending on innovation, while streamlining their banks to adapt to the new face of the bank in the digital sector.
With total badets of $ 51.9 billion, 5,000 employees and 750,000 customers across Alberta, ATB Financial is only a fraction of the size of the Big Five banks. ATB, for example, has deployed its Facebook Messenger chatbot, which can facilitate payments last February, months ahead of many of its larger competitors.
This was one of the technological changes that Mowat oversaw during his 11 years at the helm.
The bank – which is less than one twentieth the size of Royal Bank of Canada – has also deployed humanoid robots in some places. branches, and the use of retina scanning to provide bank access to the homeless without the need for a traditional card as identification.
Banks will see more changes in the next decade than current bankers in their entire career, Mowat
"We could have exactly the right size … Big banks will struggle to be agile," he said. he stated in an interview.
Last September, ATB began using biometric identification technology as part of a partnership. -Prof C is Boyle Street Community Services, which supports the homeless and other vulnerable people in Edmonton. At the resulting ATB agency, Four Directions Financial, the use of a retinal scanner or fingerprint allows people without an official ID to make transactions banking.
Stange, who has worked at ATB since 2009 and was most recently director of clients, acknowledges a few big shoes to fill, but says the bank still has some innovative projects in the pipeline – including the application of Registry technology distributed behind Bitcoin to the province's oil and gas industry.
"We have a lot of things at stake … We are using blockchain technology and we are joining forces with a few energy companies to create a blockchain proof of concept, which will be much more efficient, much more transparent and reduce the risk of blockchain. the companies involved in the regulation. "Mr. Stange said: [TRADUCTION]
ATB is in the process of developing a concept that will regulate oil and gas industry transactions almost instantly on a secure and private blockchain system. f the current process used in the industry that takes weeks to complete.
For Stange, baduming the best work at ATB is "humiliating". He plans to take the time to learn by listening to feedback from customers and employees.
But another launch is already imminent: the Alberta bank is preparing to launch an online bank only this fall.
We are ready to invest in technology and human resources to develop a unique offering, "Stange said
ATB itself has a unique structure, being a crown. company owned by the province of Alberta. In 1938, the province's social credit government created a system of temporary financial institutions called Tranches du Trésor to give Albertans an alternative source of credit.
The bank grows with the province's economy and, in the 1990s, branches as a competitive financial services provider. She became a provincial Crown corporation in October 1997 and was renamed ATB Financial in 2002, while she was expanding her investment offerings.
ATB expanded its offerings to the day-to-day management of banking and wealth, including 300 branches
The Crown-owned bank remains independent of the Government of Alberta, with governance rules such as: that prohibition for public servants to sit on its board of directors to strengthen its independence, and it does not receive any additional funding.
"There is a lot of talk, should the government have a bank?" said Mowat. "And I think the specificity of Alberta … is not as established as in the rest of Canada, because it has very special needs that take advantage of this local knowledge."
On this note, ATB does not intend to expand its footprint "We still have work to do in Alberta," he says.
"We would build technologies that would be ubiquitous and that would not recognize geographic boundaries, but we focus a lot on the boundaries of the province. a lot about Alberta and Alberta businesses. "
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