Managing Director, Real Estate Secured Lending (RESL)

BMO•Toronto, ON

3d•CA$170,000 - CA$185,000

About The Position

Managing Director, Real Estate Secured Lending (RESL) provides enterprise-wide leadership and strategic direction for the development, modernization, and governance of acquisition strategies across the Real Estate Secured Lending portfolio. As a senior executive accountable for delivering sustainable, high-quality growth, the Managing Director shapes the long-term vision for RESL credit strategy—balancing customer experience, competitive positioning, prudent risk management, and regulatory expectations. This role operates at the intersection of Product, Risk, Modeling, Distribution, and Enterprise Functions, ensuring that RESL acquisition strategies are integrated, automated, and grounded in robust analytics, segmentation, model-enabled decisioning, collateral valuation capabilities, and dynamic market intelligence. The Managing Director ensures strategy evolution reflects shifts in customer behaviour, housing market conditions, macroeconomic trends, and regulatory developments across Canadian and U.S. retail credit environments. The Managing Director provides executive leadership across the credit lifecycle, ensuring seamless connection between acquisition, account management, portfolio monitoring, and collections strategies. They drive the development of enterprise-grade predictive capabilities, early warning systems, and end-to-end credit processes that safeguard resilience, optimize risk-adjusted returns, and support enterprise growth priorities.

Requirements

Post secondary education or equivalent work experience
10+ years Financial Services experience preferably in a credit related area
Credit risk and analytical skills to assess risk in strategy development
Understanding of modelling, advanced analytics, and data analytics
Experience in stress testing
Strong quantitative/analytical skills
Advanced knowledge of Credit Policies and processes
Thorough knowledge of the Bank Lending Process training tools and qualification process
Strong understanding of linkage between Credit risk strategies and Bank’s financial management
In-depth knowledge of Risk Management theory, processes, and portfolio management reporting techniques
Familiarity with U.S. and Canadian regulations relating to retail credit
Ability to influence others in terms of credit strategy and direction.
Ability to network and establish industry relationships.

Responsibilities

Sets the strategic direction and governs retail credit strategies across the product suite (RESL, Unsecured Lending, Business Banking), driving ROE‑accretive primary customer growth while ensuring alignment to Board‑approved risk appetite.
Defines 1LOD business requirements for predictive models developed by 2LOD, ensuring robust model integration, lifecycle management, and ecosystem connectivity rooted in granular segmentation, behavioural data, and advanced analytics.
Oversees the enterprise RESL credit customer journey, ensuring agile, targeted, and data‑driven decisioning across acquisition, account management, and collections, with responsiveness to evolving economic and competitive conditions.
Leads the design of enterprise monitoring frameworks, risk indicators, loss forecasting methodologies, and downturn readiness strategies that enable timely, proactive de‑risking and sustained portfolio resilience.
Synthesizes insights from credit analytics, marketing, pricing, forecasting, capital considerations, and market trends to shape holistic acquisition strategies that optimize P&L outcomes and support multi‑year business objectives.
Partners with First‑Party Fraud Strategy leadership to shape model‑driven credit proposals, fraud mitigation strategies, and policy change recommendations that protect the portfolio and uphold customer trust.
Ensures strict adherence to the Enterprise Risk Management Framework, regulatory policy requirements, and internal governance standards; escalates and documents exceptions where appropriate.
Leads investment prioritization for data, digital platforms, system enhancements, and analytic tools that advance automation, decision accuracy, and strategic agility across the credit ecosystem.
Serves as 1LOD model owner for RESL‑related models, overseeing performance management, overlays, usage governance, and strategic alignment with business needs.
Champions BMO’s purpose, culture, and people agenda—advancing inclusion, building leadership succession, enhancing organizational capability, and setting a strong tone for transparent challenge, disciplined risk management, and high performance.
Develops, maintains and supports the implementation of retail credit acquisition and account management strategies and decision support tools for their retail credit product suite that align with business requirements and risk appetite to optimize decisions and productivity and balance risk and profitability.
Brings together inputs (e.g. credit and marketing analytics, pricing, growth forecasts, etc.) to develop holistic business strategies to optimize P&L outcomes against set goals.
Develops proposals "in service" of Product teams, incorporating their strategic goals and aligning frequently on desired outcomes.
Develops pre-delinquency / collections / “placemat” strategies for their credit product suite, incorporating predictive modeling, forecasting and early warning analytics, to design targeted approaches for products, processes, channels etc. based on unique customer risk levels and financial behaviour, to optimize loss performance.
With Head, First Party Fraud Strategy, develops accurate credit proposals (incl. revenue and loss forecasts) and supports policy change proposals, using statistical models developed by 2nd line Modeling team and other analytical methods / tools to mitigate first party fraud losses.
Refines strategies to optimize through-the-cycle ROE within risk appetite and applicable regulation/internal policies, ensuring adherence to Key Risk Metrics (KRM)s.
Defines 1LOD business requirements specific to the in-scope credit strategy, to support predictive models developed in 2LOD, ensuring connectivity across the retail credit strategies/ecosystem.
Provides inputs to 2nd line Modeling team for development and prioritization decisions.
Ensures credit strategies adhere to BMO’s Enterprise Risk Management Framework and supporting policies, standards and methodologies.
Creates credit risk-focused portfolio monitoring for the applicable retail credit product suite to ensure risk remains within guardrails (e.g., concentration monitoring) and inform credit risk appetite.
Monitors and reports on strategy performance, credit decisioning, and general portfolio dynamics, assessing results versus expectations to ensure performance is in line with expectations, flagging breaches of expectations, under/overperformance, emerging risks to optimize and develop new strategies.
Develops strategies for investments for data, systems, tools, and team resources with impacts across Product, ACOE, Credit Risk, and Ops teams.
Defines business requirements, builds investment cases, and serves as point of contact (with respective groups, e.g., EFM and T&O delivering project) for proposed improvements or expansions needed to implement the retail credit product suite strategies.
Serves as 1LOD model owner for models used to develop the retail credit product suite credit strategy (e.g., holistically assess performance, apply overlays, relay "on-the-ground" issues to Modeling team).
Ensures strategies beyond specified appetite (e.g., LLE, delinquencies, bps) and policy exceptions are escalated, documented and accepted by the appropriate committees/authorities.
Within the mandate of this role, promotes and supports the Bank’s risk culture including ensuring employees understand their accountabilities for risk-taking activities, promoting an environment of open communication and effective challenge, and establishing the “tone from the top” through leading by example.