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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 areas are you exploring?
Montresa McMillan: TD Invent, the bank’s innovation approach, uses a repeatable model to explore emerging technologies and determine how they can be used to meet the real-world needs of our customers, colleagues and communities. TD colleagues are at the heart of this approach: everyone at TD is encouraged to play a role through a shared commitment to innovate with purpose.
Bank-wide, we investigate how we can use emerging technologies to reshape the banking experience. Earlier this year we introduced our first generative artificial intelligence [GenAI] pilots and continued to expand our growth [Virtual Reality] VR programming. For GenAI, our pilots included a virtual assistant trained in TD policies and procedures to help contact center colleagues find answers to customer questions in seconds, as well as GitHub Copilot, a programming assistant to help our engineers streamline the coding workflow streamline.
We also launched our Immersive Learning VR pilot, where our colleagues in select industries use virtual reality to simulate everyday customer interactions and build trust in a judgment-free space. The feedback was incredible: almost 80% of our colleagues who participated said VR was more effective than traditional training.
girlfriend: 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 also to lead. We’ve deliberately worked to create an environment that democratizes innovation: our colleagues have the opportunity to ideate, own their ideas, and see them through to completion.
But we go further than encouraging innovation; it is just as important for us to protect them. This is reflected in our growing patent base, which has grown by 40% to more than 1,000 peers in the last three years alone. TD is now the largest patent applicant 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, which uses virtual reality to connect our interns and co-op students across Canada.
girlfriend: What benefits and challenges do you see GenAI bringing to both banks and consumers?
McMillan: GenAI gives us the potential to transform everyday experiences and make them more intuitive, efficient and personal for our customers and colleagues. We’re in the early stages of exploring GenAI and right now we’re focused on using the technology to improve our colleagues’ work, streamline simple tasks, and inspire their creativity.
The results have already had an impact. Testing our GenAI virtual assistant for our contact centers has already led to a 20% reduction in customer wait times, and our colleagues have started resolving queries faster than before.
With promising early results across the sector, many organizations may be tempted to act faster than they are willing to. However, at TD our focus is on balancing our customers’ desires for convenient digital solutions with the trust they have given us. We will continue to introduce GenAI carefully to maintain that trust.
