Julie Lévesque, CIO and Executive Vice President of Technology and Operations for Banque Nationale du Canada (BNC) and McGill-HEC Montréal EMBA 2016 alumna, has been named CIO of the Year – Private Sector by IT World Canada.

The CIO of the Year Awards recognize Canadian technology leaders who have demonstrated business and technological vision, entrepreneurship, a capacity to drive enterprise transformation and a demonstrated ability to drive value in the marketplace.

Julie was appointed as CIO of BNC in 2020.

Here is more on Julie and her nomination – excerpt from IT World Canada:

Her tenure at the bank proves her effective communication skills and strong understanding of corporate culture combined with excellent technological acumen: attributes that contribute to the success of CIOs.

Customer and employee experiences are central to BNC’s transformation, and to achieve success, Julie established effective two-way communication that continuously elicits feedback and ideas from employees. In this way, she was able to marshal the entire workforce to achieve significant technological and operational outcomes.

Overall, this transformation has moved BNC up 6 positions to claim second place in the Canadian Banking Customer Experience Index.  Employee satisfaction hit new highs and the transformation produced more than $87 million in savings over 2 years with an ROE of 21.7 per cent.

In 2021, Julie was given the added responsibility for NBC Operations.  She is also responsible for the venture capital arm of BNC.

BNC President and CEO, Laurent Ferreira says, “Julie is a talented leader who is not afraid of surrounding herself with the best and the brightest.  She also has an excellent understanding of the banking industry and market disrupting trends.”

Finally, Julie is an innovator and widely respected for her commitment to diversity and inclusion. Her innovative thinking led to a forward-thinking project to hire neuro-atypical people in the data and analytics field.

Julie’s opinion about the EMBA program:

“The McGill – HEC EMBA is tailored for working executives, as it puts their professional experience to use in the learning process. The program also enables us to use our natural strengths as steppingstones for the development of our leadership style in accordance with our values. Mine is based on trust, complicity and interdisciplinarity.”