November 3, 2017, marks the bicentenary of the Bank of Montreal (BMO). Two hundred years in business is a remarkable achievement in North America and the bank has been preparing to mark this historic occasion properly for some time. Some years ago the bank engaged Laurence Mussio, a Canadian business historian, to begin work on writing its history.
The first installment of his work is A Vision Greater than Themselves: The Making of the Bank of Montreal, 1817–2017. This is a coffee-table book; the scholarly work will appear next year. But A Vision is not your typical coffee-table book. Rather, it is a remarkable piece of work in its breadth and in its depth. (Given the breadth and depth of the publication it is unfortunate that there is no index.) The book is divided into three parts. The first and longest deals with the “BMO Universe”—key events and people. The second covers the obligatory “Banking by the Numbers” and the third, perhaps the most intriguing of all, addresses the “Material Culture of BMO Banking.”
Dealing with the third part first, the reviewer found it particularly intriguing because the author has taken twenty-five different objects, using photographs, to demonstrate the bank's history. These range from the nineteenth-century “Miller” chest (which was used to protect valuables) to a gold scale from the Yukon Gold Rush to the more recent Chicago-based Harris Bank's Hubert T. Lion (designed to give customers comfort with their bank).
Numbers are obviously important in business. In part 2 the reader will find the normal banking statistics of assets, deposits, loans, etc., but all are presented in easy-to-read graphic form.
Part 1 contains the narrative, which will undoubtedly be expanded upon in the 2018 scholarly sequel. Here the reader will find not just sections on the bank's founders (including recent founders, such as the investment bankers whose firm was acquired in the late 1980s), previous leaders (as long as they are no longer living), and the various Canadian acquisitions over time (although notably absent is the failed attempt to merge with the Royal Bank of Canada [RBC] in the late 1990s), but also less typical sections, on the relationship between bankers and art and sponsorship of sporting teams.
A Vision doesn't shy away from controversy. It deals up front with Edwin Henry King, who ran the bank for most of the 1860s and is, to this day, the most unpopular banker in Canadian history. When King was leader, BMO was by far the biggest bank in Canada—and if not the biggest in North America, one of the biggest. King is featured as one of the thirteen leaders in BMO's history from 1834 to 1989.
One of the featured leaders is Sir Henry Vincent Meredith, president from 1913 to 1927. It is noted that Meredith “piloted a wave of mergers and acquisitions” (p. 20). It is not noted that, in spite of organic growth and mergers, BMO gave up its position as the number one Canadian bank to the upstart RBC while he was president.
In the section “Pivot Points,” dealing with ten key dates in the bank's history, A Vision returns to King—“The Monetary King of Canada”—as he takes charge of the bank in 1863. It deals with his successes but not his failures, which included alienating the rest of the Canadian banking system as well as the minister of finance. Indeed, A Vision displays an extraordinary amount of chutzpah in the section “Financial Innovations and Firsts,” which deals first and foremost with Canada's first Bank Act (1871). The Bank Act was clearly of the first order of importance to Canada and is described as the result of compromise. It was also very much the product of a backlash against BMO that cost King and the then minister of finance their jobs.
On page 240 the point is made that little information is to be found in the minute books. It would be interesting to know what the author found in regard to BMO's ill-fated attempts to impose its vision on the Canadian banking system in 1869. For example, did political contributions convince the government of the merits of the first Bank Act proposed—one that was favored by BMO but was quickly dropped because of widespread negative reaction?
There are the inevitable minor errors—Ball being the youngest president (when in fact King was) and the claim that bankers spawned the creation of the audit profession. There are, however, two major errors of omission, over and above that of the failed late-1990s merger. One is understandable, but one is not. In the foreword, current CEO William A. Downe refers to a 1917 New York Times article, displayed on the opposite page, that makes the point that the bank's charter “was modelled upon the plan . . . which had been drawn up by Alexander Hamilton.” Nowhere else is this extraordinarily important historical point mentioned, not even in the section “Written Documents,” where the first document cited is the Articles of Association.
The more understandable omission is of BMO's long slow decline in the financial company league tables from number one in Canada and one or two in North America to fifth in Canada (behind Manulife Financial Corporation) and below fiftieth in North America. This omission is understandable given that it would detract from the celebratory nature of the book but hopefully will be dealt with in the scholarly sequel.
All said and done, Mussio has done an exceptional job in pulling the diverse history of this important North American bank together. He is clearly knowledgeable and the breadth and depth of that knowledge is on display along with his excellent writing style, which includes a sense of humor.
