Awards and Recognition

BMO^® continues to be recognized for excellence as an employer and in business. Here are some recent examples:

• Greater Toronto Area's Top 50 Employers 2008 - The Greater Toronto's Top 50 Employers project is a competition organized by the editors of Canada's Top 100 Employers. This special designation recognizes the Greater Toronto employers that lead their industries in offering exceptional places to work.
• Progressive Aboriginal Relations Award – Gold Level Standing – The Canadian Council of Aboriginal Business (CCAB) honoured BMO with a gold level standing in the Progressive Aboriginal Relations (PAR) award for initiating Aboriginal community economic development.  PAR provides a framework for business to examine their approach to the emerging Aboriginal marketplace and gives them tools to help improve their performance. The PAR Award included a rigorous evaluation of BMO’s employment practices for Aboriginal people including recruitment, retention and promotion.
• Ability Edge Award - In 2007, BMO was recognized by the National Career Edge organization for being the most successful Canadian corporation in employing Ability Edge interns. The Ability Edge Program provides on-the-job internship opportunities for university, college or high school graduates with disabilities. This is the third time that BMO has been honoured with this award.

• Corporate Knights 50 Best Corporate Citizens 2007 – BMO continues to be recognized for its leadership in corporate social responsibility, most recently ranked eighth in the Corporate Knights Best 50 Corporate Citizens Ranking 2007. For the fifth consecutive year, BMO Financial Group has been ranked among the top 10 companies in Canada – the only financial institution to be ranked in the top ten Best Corporate Citizens in each of the last five years.
• BMO has achieved standing on both the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (North America) and FTSE4Good Series Index, for its environmental efforts. 2007 is the second and third year, respectively, that BMO has been recognized. The indices measure the performance of companies that meet globally recognized corporate responsibility standards including environmental practices. BMO is also implementing both short and longer term initiative aimed at reducing our footprint on the environment.

• BMO Capital Markets^®† was recently ranked by Greenwich Associates as first in Research; tied for first in Overall Quality; tied for first in Sales to Institutional investors.
• BMO Capital Markets was co-advisor on sale of BCE to private equity consortium, a CAN$ 51 billion transaction – the largest in Canadian history.
• BMO Nesbitt Burns^®† has been ranked the top Equity Research Group for the 27th consecutive year, a record achievement as determined by Canada's leading institutional investors in the 2007 Brendan Wood International Survey.
• BMO has ranked 2nd in the “2007 Canada’s Most Trusted Companies for Privacy Study”. This is an independently conducted study by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Carlson Marketing Group of Canada which measures public perception of both Canadian and global companies’ privacy and security practices. This is the second consecutive year that BMO ranked in the Top 5 and ahead of all other financial institutions included in the study.
• BMO Investorline^®† has been named Best Online Brokerage five times in the Globe and Mail’s annual review of online brokerage firms. Ranking criteria include commissions, real-time account updates, transaction history and website navigation.
• BMO computer centres in Scarborough and Barrie are recognized by the Uptime Institute.  Scarborough Computer Centre has delivered continuous availability for the critical IT Infrastructure for 8 consecutive years placing it in the top 1% of all measured data centers across North America. Barrie Computer Centre has been externally certified as a Tier IV Data Center, the highest recognized capability for a concurrently maintainable and fault tolerant facilities infrastructure.

®* Registered trade-mark of Bank of Montreal.
®† Registered trade-mark of Bank of Montreal, used under licence.