Growing up in the small Illinois town of Roscoe, Amy Bartlett never imagined that she would go into banking. Today, she holds BMO's House Discretionary Limit, which means she is one of a handful at the bank allowed to recommend that the CEO or chief risk officer extend more than the bank's maximum credit limit to a client.
Bartlett joined BMO in 2007 as an analyst working with large diversified companies, and has stayed at the bank since in its Chicago office, now also supervising bankers in Toronto and New York.
During the global financial crisis, Bartlett "went from doing new business to protecting the bank, working with clients experiencing financial distress and how we could support them," she said. She did a rotation in the securitization group, her first experience with capital markets, and then was asked to join the workouts team, dealing with companies in distress. "You got to be more strategic with clients," she said of her three-and-a-half years in that group. "That opened my eyes to the world was quite large in banking and possibilities."
In 2012, Bartlett was asked to join the corporate banking trading products group, working with "clients who didn't need traditional lending but needed other products," many of which she had never worked on before. "I joined at the right time," she said of the team she now heads. "It was when global markets started adding more to their strategies instead of just hedging."
BMO had never done some of this business before, and it became part of Bartlett's job to work with the head of global markets debt to understand what clients needed in products from metals to margin lending to residential mortgage finance. "That was the moment I realized I liked this," she recalled.
In 2019, she took over leading the team, and shortly after led the bank into commercial mortgage securitization. This involved hiring bankers into the group and working with the teams that handle market risk, accounting, tax and finance. Bartlett's team had to undertake underwriting the loans with a faster process than traditional real estate loans.
First, Bartlett had to create financing guidelines for the new commercial mortgage backed securities. This involved working with risk managers on financial rules, real estate limits and internal processes, plus regulatory approvals. Then, in the months after making the first loans, her group updated the guidelines based on what they learned. "There's always that constant push of, how can we do better, never really settling," she said.
Bartlett and her husband have two school-aged children, and while raising them, "I have grown as a leader to have empathy and celebrate diverse experiences and perspectives and people," she said. "I know they're watching me and seeing how I balance a highly demanding job but also have to show up for the big moments in my family," she said.
She recommends that junior bankers ask questions to learn about what they don't understand, and that they speak up when they have ideas. "If you're given a seat at the table, we want to hear your voice," she said.
