MERCHANT SOLUTIONS
THE MOBILE CFO
TREASURY SOLUTIONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY We speak with Mike Cummins, head of Treasury Solutions at Citizens Bank, to talk about the upcoming changes in the banking industry and how Citizens is keeping up with these new technologies.
PQ: What are you doing from a mobile perspective in dealing with treasury solutions? CUMMINS: From a mobile strategy perspective, we have a robust offering right now. In commercial banking, it’s important for clients to be able to use the technology for convenience, decision-making and approval -- whether that’s for wire initiation of templates, approval of those wires, release of those wires, ACH transactions or even positive pay exception items. We continue to make that offering more robust, more efficient and more intuitive to use for our clients. There is a lot of discussion in the market around mobile payments. If you think about the new generation, they don’t have checkbooks. All of 68
Payment Quarterly | Q4 2015
their payments are being made via mobile device technology. They’re going to be looking for the best technology as it relates to a mobile device. Our goal is to enhance the convenience and the decisionmaking capabilities around our mobile offering and then continue to expand what clients can actually do via the mobile technology. PQ: Specifically, what kind of features are you looking to add, in the next few months or year? CUMMINS: We’d like to be able to initiate free form wires or free form payments, which right now are from templates. We are also working to capture clearer images on the exception items around positive pay.
PQ: From the treasury management perspective, one year from now, how will you be securing your business? What technological innovations are there, such as big data, risk & fraud management, are you hoping to implement or integrate? CUMMINS: It’s not only a year from now, we think about these potential threats daily, whether its malware or denial of service attacks or card fraud. We look at all of those measures to make sure that from a Treasury Solutions perspective, our offerings are the most secure not only to protect our clients and their money, but also to protect their information. We understand what the latest technology and software is in the market to help us protect