Paymentus Partners With Citizens to Provide Real-Time Bill Payments

Citizens Financial Group is partnering with Paymentus Corp., a Charlotte, N.C., provider of bill-payment processing, to offer real-time electronic bill payment and money-transfer services for retail banking customers nationwide.

Citizens will be rolling out Paymentus’s Bill Center and Loan Payments products. Bill Center provides users with a view of their bills and financial obligations, enables them to pay their bills using debit or credit cards, and provides immediate confirmation of payment to the biller.

Loan Payments will enable payments through Paymentus’s biller-direct electronic bill presentment and payment platform. Consumers can use the platform to make payments on loans using checking or savings accounts or on debit cards and digital wallets through multiple channels in real time. Paymentus provides cloud-based electronic bill payment technology to more than 1,700 billers and financial institutions across North America.

Consumer preference for real-time payments is growing. Some 89% of consumers want more real-time payment options from their digital-banking providers, according to a 2021 Aite-Novarica report, and eight of 10 consumers want the option of paying bills by credit or debit card, according to CreditCards.com’s “Payment Methods Statistics.”

“Customer expectations around payments are rapidly increasing, so integrating real-time payments and expanding money movement capabilities within our digital banking platform will help make Citizens the bank of choice for the modern retail bank customer,” Beth Johnson, chief experience officer for Citizens, says in a prepared statement.

In early 2019, Paymentus partnered with PayPal Holdings Inc. to provide real-time bill payment through the PayPal wallet, Venmo, and PayPal Credit. The integration of Paymentus to PayPal’s platform slowed initially due to the size and complexity of the job. By October of that year, PayPal chief executive and president Dan Schulman said the integration was on track to be completed by the end of the year, in spite of the delay. The addition of Paymentus was important to PayPal as it took the company into a wholly new—and fast-growing—payments market, Schulman said at the time.

“Forward thinking partners like Citizens recognize that providing seamless real-time money movement and bill pay capabilities are essential components to a premier banking experience,” says Paymentus founder and chief executive Dushyant Sharma in a prepared statement.