The Bank of Montreal is building a new 346,000 square foot “urban campus” at the southwest corner of Yonge and Dundas streets.
The four-story building will be located above an existing Nordstrom at the former home of a Sears department store that closed in 2014.
Once completed, the bank says the building will be home to 3,500 employees.
It will feature “advanced digital technology, natural light through a four-storey atrium and collaborative workspaces,” according to BMO.
“It is new progressive workplace right here in the heart of Canada’s most iconic commercial space,” BMO Financial Group CEO Darryl White said in announcing the new campus on Thursday morning. “What we are building here is central to the business transformation already underway at BMO.”
White described the intersection of Yonge and Dundas streets as “the heartbeat of Toronto” and said it was important to the bank to be a part of the action.
He said that campus will feature large open spaces where BMO employees will be able to “create together and to design together.” He said that the campus will also be connected to the Financial District through the PATH as well as mass transit; something that he said will help make it “a place where people want to work.”
BMO has not said how much it plans to spend on retrofitting the space but White called it a “meaningful investment.”
“There is nothing else like it in the downtown core,” he said.
Campus to be completed by 2021
The campus is expected to be completed by 2021 and will complement BMO’s existing headquarters at First Canadian Place, where the bank recently extended its lease by another 15 years.
The 3,500 employees who will work at the campus will be coming from existing BMO locations.
“I am very gratified that this bank at this time has decided not only to invest in Toronto but in downtown Toronto, where it is really important that we continue to locate jobs,” Mayor John Tory said during Thursday’s announcement. “There is no problem attracting people to live in downtown Toronto, in fact it is something we are having trouble keeping up with, but it is also more desirable in terms of the kind of city we are trying to build to have people work close to where they live. The more jobs we can have created close to where all these people are living the better for keeping the city alive.”
