On Oct 6, 2003, Standard&Poor's Ratings Services affirmed all the ratings on Bank of Montreal (BMO) and its subsidiaries. At the same time, Standard&Poor's revised the outlook on BMO to stable from negative. The negative outlook on BMO's U.S. subsidiaries remains unchanged. (See ratings list.) The ratings on BMO reflect its very strong domestic personal and commercial (P&C) bank, which provides it with a solid base for consistent earnings performance. The performance of the wholesale banking group has shown improvement in the first part of 2003, coming off of two years' soft performance that were negatively affected by the difficult credit environment and challenging global equity markets. The private client group, which is small in proportion
