BMO Financial Group

In Toronto, BMO brought 3,000 employees together inside four floors of a former department store—transforming an unlikely property into a digitally enabled campus. IA used the building’s extraordinary scale to make people and activity visible across neighborhoods, floors, and functions.

Daylight enters through new 12-foot windows and rooftop skylights, while retained escalators move through soaring atriums as connective landmarks. Inclusive amenities, accessible circulation, multilingual signage, activity-based settings, and unassigned seating help more people participate fully. By choosing adaptive reuse, BMO also advanced its sustainability goals, proving that an obsolete retail environment could become a progressive workplace asset.

In Chicago, IA translated BMO’s transformation into a vertical headquarters that consolidated three offices and aligned multiple business lines around the One Bank philosophy. Consistent floorplates and universal work settings allow teams to expand, contract, and relocate with less cost and disruption.

Central cafés, shared quiet rooms, collaboration hubs, hoteling, and flexible conference spaces encourage interaction across organizational boundaries, while hybrid-enabled rooms strengthen participation across locations. A scalable experiential masterplan connects the bank’s heritage with its future through graphics, artifacts, and artwork. The headquarters gives BMO an adaptable operating platform that supports cultural alignment, organizational growth, and change over time.