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Montresa McMillan, senior vice president of Enterprise Digital Strategy, Innovation & Payments and Strategy, and Change & Operational Excellence at TD Bank Group, explains why customers, colleagues and communities are at the heart of innovation.
Global Finance: How does TD approach innovation and what are some of the areas you are exploring?
Montresa McMillan: TD Invent, the bank’s approach to innovation, uses a repeatable model to explore emerging technologies and determine how they can be used to address the real needs of our customers, colleagues and communities. TD colleagues are at the center of this approach: Everyone at TD is encouraged to play a role through a shared commitment to innovate with purpose.
Across the bank, we’re exploring how we can leverage emerging technologies to reimagine the banking experience. Earlier this year, we introduced our first generative artificial intelligence [GenAI] pilots and continued to grow our [Virtual Reality] VR programming. For GenAI, our pilots included a virtual assistant trained on TD policies and procedures to help contact-center colleagues retrieve answers to customer questions in seconds, as well as GitHub Copilot, a programming assistant to help our engineers streamline the coding workflow.
We also launched our Immersive Learning VR pilot, where our colleagues in select branches are using virtual reality to simulate everyday customer interactions and build confidence in a judgment-free space. The feedback has been incredible—almost 80% of our colleagues who participated said VR was more effective than traditional training.
GF: How important are TD employees to TD’s overall innovation mandate?
McMillan: A key principle of TD Invent is that our colleagues are not only encouraged to participate in our innovation ecosystem but to lead the charge. We’ve deliberately worked to create an environment in which innovation is democratized: Our colleagues are empowered to ideate, take ownership of their ideas and see them through to the end.
But we go beyond encouraging innovation—it’s equally important for us to protect it. That’s reflected in our growing patents base, which has grown by 40% in the past three years alone to reach over 1,000 colleagues. TD is now the leading patent filer among financial institutions in Canada. Our iD8 program, which crowdsources ideas from across the bank, is another example of how our colleagues are leading innovation. Last year alone, a record 18,000 ideas were submitted through the program. To date, we’ve implemented more than 9,000 ideas, including one that proposed a new way to bring interns and co-op students together in a hybrid workplace. This led to the creation of our Early Talent VR program, in which virtual reality is used to connect our interns and co-op students across Canada.
GF: What benefits and challenges do you see GenAI bringing to both banks and consumers?
McMillan: GenAI is giving us the potential to transform everyday experiences and make them more intuitive, efficient and personalized for our customers and colleagues. We’re in the early stages of exploring GenAI, and at this moment we’re focusing on using the technology to enhance the work of our colleagues, streamline simple tasks and inspire their creativity.
The results have already been impactful. The testing of our GenAI virtual assistant for our contact centers has already led to a 20% reduction in customer hold times, and our colleagues have begun to resolve inquiries faster than they could before.
With promising early results across the industry, many organizations may be tempted to move faster than they are ready to. At TD, however, our focus is balancing our customers’ desires for convenient digital solutions with the trust they have given us. We’re going to continue to introduce GenAI thoughtfully to maintain that trust.