Making Payments

accessGLOBAL ACH, powered by Visa, is a cross-border payouts solution that gives Citizens customers global reach into local clearing systems to enable fast, accurate, and flexible payments to their beneficiaries. By tapping into the accessGLOBAL ACH network, you will have access to many correspondent bank relationships without needing to open, manage, or reconcile in-country accounts. Simply provide a payment file with payment routing instructions for each beneficiary and accessGLOBAL ACH will do the rest. Competitive foreign exchange rates are available and eligible customers have access to Foreign Currency Accounts to fund payments in local currency.
 
With accessGLOBAL ACH, you have the reach of the world's largest banks at your fingertips.
 
Key Features and Benefits
• Send payments to over 100 countries in local currency and local clearing
• Straight through processing for outgoing payments as well as returns
• Consolidate banking relationships and reconcile fewer accounts
• No incoming wire fees assessed to the beneficiary
• One file process for all cross-border payments
• No intermediary bank fees

Exchanging electronic financial data between your internal systems and your bank shouldn’t be a hassle. Or require a significant investment in new technologies.

Our accessXCHANGE® solution provides a safe, secure and compatible format for transmitting and receiving receivables and payment data to and from the bank, ensuring that information gets to the right place at the right time, without requiring upgrades to your hardware and software systems.

• Interfaces directly with your ERP (enterprise resource planning) treasury workstation, accounting systems or other applications that generate or use transactional data.
• Compatible with SAP®, Oracle®, Microsoft Excel®, Microsoft Dynamics GP®, QuickBooks®, Peachtree® and other programs and applications

For receivables:

• Provides you with information on multiple types of fund receipts and check reports using a single format.
• Ideally suited for customers who use ACH, Lockbox and E-Z Deposit® receivables solutions.

For payments:

• Enables you to consolidate payment information from a variety of systems and deliver them to the bank in a single file for execution.
• Commonly used by clients who use payment services such as Integrated Payables, accessGLOBAL ACH®, CheckMint®, Positive Pay and Account Reconciliation.

Account Reconciliation automates back-office operations and reduces exposure to errors and check fraud.

• Quickly reconcile paid checks, match payments to statements, and identify outstanding items, such as uncleared checks, encoding errors and misposts.
• View reconciliation reports on accessOPTIMA® — Citizens treasury management platform — or have data delivered via file transmission.

Refocus your energies to managing cash flow with these complementing solutions.

• Deposit Reconciliation makes it easy to identify the origin of deposits made at your main office and satellite locations.
• Positive Pay boosts check activity monitoring and check fraud management.

Paying by check can be time-consuming and inefficient. Wire transfers can be expensive, particularly for small dollar amounts.

Our Automated Clearing House (ACH) solution offers a faster, cost-effective and reliable alternative. ACH allows you to conduct electronic transactions with any individual or organization that has a qualified bank or money market account. Most transactions can be completed by the next business day.

ACH serves as the central electronic payment platform for many payment and receivables solutions that allow you to:

• Make single or batch payments to suppliers within the U.S.
• Automate and execute direct payroll deposits to your employees’ accounts.
• Make federal and state tax payments.
• Receive payments.
• Automatically transfer funds to and from authorized accounts with Citizens and other banks.
• Receive a partial rebate on qualified ACH payments made through our Integrated Payables application.
• Review, approve or stop pending ACH debits online.
• Make payments to suppliers and employees outside the U.S. using our accessGLOBAL ACH® solution.

Writing and posting checks can be time-consuming, costly and prone to errors. Unauthorized checks can put your company at financial and reputational risk.

CheckMint® offers an attractive way to outsource checkwriting and free up staff time for more important tasks. Simply send us an electronic file of checks you want to issue and we’ll print and mail your checks by 7 pm EST the next business day. We’ll also provide a check register and “check-issued” file you can use to verify checks as they’re paid from your accounts. To prevent fraud and protect the integrity and privacy of your data transactions, CheckMint® incorporates sophisticated security protocols including:

• Encryption of your data files
• Multi-level validations
• Inclusion of control totals in your payment files
• Use of laser-printing and blank check stock to eliminate risk of pre-printed check inventory theft

For added security, you can use our Positive Pay solution to review, approve or deny pending check debits posted to your accounts.

Over-funding cash disbursement accounts is not an optimal use of working capital. Under-funding can result in overdraft charges. For companies with heavy payment volumes, providing appropriate funding to cover debits on a daily basis is critical.

Our Controlled Disbursement service can eliminate “funding uncertainty” by notifying you each morning of the total dollar amount of pending check payments scheduled to clear that evening. You can view this information online using our accessOPTIMA® application or receive notifications by fax. So you’ll know exactly how much you need to transfer into your account that day.

Much more than a “warning system,” Controlled Disbursement is a powerful tool for:

• Improving cash forecasting practices
• Maintaining an appropriate balance of disbursable and investable funds
• Reducing the possibility of expensive overdrafts
• Maximizing the earning and loan-reduction potential of liquid assets

A growing number of companies are replacing paper-based payments communications with systems using the standard Internet protocol for data transmission: Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).

EDI enables financial systems among different companies, financial institutions and government agencies to transmit, receive and process orders, invoices, payments and other electronic communications using a standardized document format.

Electronic payments processing can help you:

• Make secure just-in-time payments to suppliers in the U.S. and abroad.
• Automate traditionally manual payments issuance, saving time and money on check preparation, postage.
• Increase data security and integrity of your files and communications.
• Speed reconciliation and payment matching to POs and invoices and report on payables more frequently.
• Improve cash forecasting processes with up-to-the-minute balances.
• Get secure 24/7 access to files on computers and mobile devices.

Electronic payments processing is often used to:

• Originate payments to overseas customers and suppliers using our accessGLOBAL ACH® application.
• Transmit checkwriting requests to be fulfilled through our CheckMint® service.
• Initiate system-to-system bulk wire transfer payments.
• Send remittance instructions to authorize your suppliers to charge approved invoice amounts using our accessAPcard solution
• Make ACH payments to your suppliers without needing to store or maintain bank account details for your vendor(s) using our Integrated Payables service

Citizens ERPConnect allows you to integrate your Citizens' treasury management and payments functions directly into your company's ERP system. This solutions helps you save time and build efficiency within your organization. It allows you to reconcile faster with bank data feeds, reduce encoding errors, and increase visibility and control.

Our integrated payables solution enables companies to automate the entire invoice-to-pay process via a single platform while choosing from a range of settlement options and earning rebates on virtual card and ACH payments.

Maximize efficiency

• Reduce the time AP staff spends on manual tasks by achieving automation across the entire invoice-to-pay process.

Optimize working capital

• Improve control over payment timing, hold on to cash longer and reduce payment processing costs.

Seamless ERP integration

• Minimize unnecessary complexity by integrating with any ERP system.

Improve vendor relationships

• Fast invoice and remittance processing with full transparency creates a better experience for everyone.

Reduce risk of payment fraud

• Mitigate risk with vendor bank authentication, multi-factor authentication, payment risk scoring and more.

Generate incremental revenue

• Turn your AP department into a revenue generator by monetizing greater portion of virtual card and ACH spend.

RTP® is the first U.S. payment network to capitalize on the speed and precision of the Internet — with virtually instantaneous transfer of funds from sender to receiver with immediate confirmation.

Beyond speed, RTP offers numerous features that eliminate steps from billing and payment procedures, provide clearer communication between buyers and sellers and increase security:

• Transfer funds 24x7x365 with immediate availability to the recipient and instant confirmation to the sender
• Take advantage of early payment discounts by planning exact payment times and receiving immediate confirmation of fund transfers
• Improve communication clarity and reduce billing disputes via Requests for Payment (RFPs), Requests for Information (RFIs) and RTP’s enhanced remittance messaging capabilities
• Automated data processing brings efficiencies to receivables management and reduces the potential for fraud and human error inherent in check, ACH and wire processing