Citizens Cash Flow Essentials™ Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2024- Nominated

Citizens Cash Flow Essentials™ is a simple, online and mobile banking platform and payment suite designed specifically with small businesses in mind. The tool provides Citizens’ small business customers with access to real-time information, seamless payment functionality, and practical tools to help them confidently meet their daily cash flow requirements and make well-informed business decisions.

Effective cash management is essential to the success of small businesses. In fact, 82% of small business failures can be traced to poor cash flow management.

Despite cash management’s critical importance, financial institutions have historically failed to offer solutions geared specifically to the needs of small business customers. In the past, cash management platforms offered by financial institutions have been built for either large commercial businesses or consumers, forcing small business owners to choose between two platforms that don’t exactly meet their needs. Additionally, due to lack of digital payment capabilities, financial institutions have incurred high operational costs because customers were directed to the branch/phone for wire payments, loan payments, and check stop payments. These factors have generally led to a poor user experience, thin relationships between financial institutions and their small business customers, and ultimately attrition.

Citizens is dedicated to continuously improving its capabilities to deliver a great experience for its customers. In surveying the market for small business cash management in 2022, it was clear that there was an industry-wide need for a platform from a financial institution that found a middle-ground between consumer and commercial solutions. Accordingly, Citizens set out to drastically redesign how small businesses interact with their bank by building a user-friendly digital platform that enables small businesses to access robust cash management capabilities through a simple user experience.

The journey to meet these needs was led by Citizens’ Enterprise Payments team and was informed directly by feedback from small businesses about their needs and goals.

The project officially kicked off in May 2022. Over the next 12 months, the team executed on several deliverables to make the roll out and ongoing marketing of Citizens Cash Flow Essentials™ successful. The longest poles in the tent were customer segmentation in the user provisioning application, marketing efforts to create website pages and sales collateral, creating new training materials for customers, and reinventing the onboarding process - which consisted of creating new legal agreements, new terms and conditions, as well as shifting 90% of manual processes to a more automated process. Other noteworthy areas of focus were simple and bundled pricing, streamlining of documentation, and training Citizens colleagues.

This extensive body of work was completed in time for Citizens Cash Flow Essentials™ to launch in May of 2023. The online and mobile banking platform bridges the gap between commercial and consumer platforms, offering an easy-to-use solution designed specifically for small businesses with a robust set of capabilities including payments, electronic invoicing, payment collection and accounting.

The product succeeded in achieving its goals. The tool offers a simplified pricing structure and has drastically streamlined the user experience for SMBs, reducing onboarding time by up to six days and eliminating 90-95% of manual data entry. Adoption continues to grow, with nearly 1,400 users today, and feedback from Citizens customers and colleagues has been positive.

Citizens also recently expanded the offering, partnering with an award-winning fintech to offer Cash Flow Forecasting through the Citizens Cash Flow Essentials™ platform. This new tool, which launched in May 2024, gives users a holistic view of their capital via a single dashboard. The tool is enabled through accounting integrations on Citizens Cash Flow Essentials™ and provides an intuitive cash flow analysis to help customers more accurately predict their growth and optimize their working capital. It also provides actionable insights and competitive benchmarking to enable business owners to compare their company to similar businesses based on geography, revenue and employee count.

In summary, Citizens Cash Flow Essentials™ offers a unique cash management solution tailored specifically to the needs of SMBs. It also exemplifies Citizens continuous commitment to delivering an exceptional experience for customers no matter how they choose to interact with their bank.