National Bank of Canada (NA-T), the sixth largest bank in the nation, is applying sustainability technologies at a heightened scale at its new headquarters in Montreal.

Inaugurated in September after construction began in 2018, National Bank Place is a 40-storey, 1.1-million-square-foot building. It brings together over 11,000 employees under one roof, who were previously scattered across five buildings.

Designed to meet LEED Gold certification and help meet its objective of cutting operational greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2025, National Bank considered the building envelope, proximity to public transit and utilizing building technologies it had never used at such a large size.

“It was a continuity with what we were already doing in our branches,” Audrey Doyon, a senior engineer advisor at National Bank, told Sustainable Biz Canada in an interview.

“We’ve been doing energy efficiency in the buildings in terms of envelope and energy for the past 15 years. So having those green features in the new headquarters was simply a continuity, really, of our perspective of environment in-house.”

National Bank had $454 billion in assets as of July 31, 2024.

Building a sustainable headquarters

Surrounding National Bank Place is a high-performance glass envelope that boosts energy efficiency. The triple glazing reduces heating and cooling loads and in turn, energy needs, Doyon explained.

Automation is central to the head office. An energy control and optimization system will lower the building's window blinds when sunlight hits the building at high intensity to reduce glare. Temperatures will be regulated without manual intervention, automatically cutting energy use for unoccupied rooms.

New to National Bank is the use of a digital twin in a building of the headquarters' heft. A simulation of the building is created virtually, allowing the company to compare and contrast if the building’s energy consumption is meeting expectations.

If it is not matching the digital twin, National Bank can do a diagnosis of "'Why is the room so hot? Oh there are more people than there should be’ . . . It really pushes the limit of using the data that was already corrected by the sensors to a more local diagnosis and overview of the building,” Doyon said. Then the problems can be fixed. 

For heating and cooling, magnetic heat pumps are installed, which National Bank said require less maintenance than screw-type models. Such equipment uses electricity rather than natural gas.

To promote public transit, the headquarters is connected to the Montreal Metro, the city's light metro rapid transit system and RESO, the ‘Underground City’. Additionally, 400 bike spaces and 80 electric vehicle charging stations are present to promote sustainable commuting.

Discussions are being held to divert organic waste from the building’s occupants to a company that produces renewable natural gas.

By moving the employees into the headquarters from the five offices, National Bank has calculated it will eliminate over 700 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Adjusting to new technologies

The COVID pandemic presented barriers during construction, Doyon recounted, as the restricted supply chains delayed work.

Another adjustment to adapt to was technology like digital twins, she said. “It’s not really been done before to this level . . . The digital twin is a really new technology that is pushing the boundaries.”

The sheer size of the building presented its own set of hurdles to overcome. National Bank had implemented some of the sustainability features in its smaller branches, but now had to push them onto a much larger building. Overseeing automated blinds on a fully glazed building was a different beast from a much smaller branch, for example.

She said it will be “interesting” to see how National Bank can apply the technologies from the headquarters into its branches and offices.

In other locations, National Bank is replacing HVAC equipment from natural gas into electric systems, according to its 2023 sustainability report. An energy improvement and remote management approach is in place across over 260 branches in Canada, which allows the bank to target the buildings with the highest energy use for improvements.