3 days to $1.135B in emergency relief.
When the pandemic hit, ATB had thousands of Alberta businesses lined up for federal emergency loans and only days to build the application path. The decision was easy. The build was the work.
A program announced on Monday that businesses needed by Friday.
In March 2020, the federal government launched CEBA — emergency loans to keep businesses alive through the first lockdown. For Alberta's businesses, ATB Financial was the front door. Thousands of them needed to apply, qualify, and receive funds in days, through digital channels, while call centres were already overwhelmed.
The leadership decision was easy: get the money out. The hard part was everything after that — a working application path, identity and eligibility checks, and a way to absorb the volume without burying our phone queue. We had the strategy. We needed the build.
Treat the launch as a 72-hour delivery.
Reframe the deadline in days, not quarters.
We stopped treating it like a project and started treating it like a delivery. Scope was what a business needed to apply and get approved. Nothing else.
Repurpose the platform we already had.
Instead of building something new under pressure, we adapted the existing customer onboarding and origination platform. It already handled the hard parts — identity, eligibility, money movement — and CEBA gave it a new job to do.
Keep executives aligned in real time.
We stayed close to the executive and senior team as decisions moved hour to hour. The goal was simple: don't let an approval wait on a meeting that hadn't been scheduled yet.
Ship, then harden under live volume.
The platform went live in 3 days. After that, the work was monitoring, hardening, and scaling as application volume climbed.
What got delivered.
in CEBA emergency relief flowed to Alberta businesses through the platform.
businesses signed up and funded — onboarded digitally, not by phone.
from go-decision to a live application path.
call-centre work days eliminated — $150K+ saved while protecting client retention and reputation.
We'd launched the ATB Personal mobile app a few weeks earlier — 180,000 users across 2.8 million sessions in the first month, with the app store rating climbing from 1.3 to 4.4. Same team, same way of working.
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