The resulting Citizens Gateway will complement the bank's existing corporate payments offerings to create a flexible, enterprise-wide commercial payment processing platform that can reduce costs, increase efficiencies and streamline the entire payments process for Citizens' corporate customers.

Built to address the unique needs of Citizens and its corporate customers, the Citizens Gateway powered by MasterCard will act as the network between Citizens, its corporate buyers and their suppliers. The Citizens Gateway supports multiple payment types and enables the "touchless" routing of electronic payments from buyer to bank to supplier. A comprehensive corporate payments solution, the Citizens Gateway will also contain information that facilitates more streamlined reconciliation and posting to both Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable systems.

"With even greater pressures being felt today by our corporate customers to watch costs and better manage diversified supplier relationships, we are excited to be able to extend our corporate payments offerings with a solution that can help them to not only improve working capital efficiency, but increase transparency and control in day-to-day operations," said D. Stephen Wooters, Head of US Commercial Cards, RBS.

Instead of multiple interfaces, the Citizens Gateway provides one gateway for more streamlined, faster and secure corporate payments. Citizens Relationship Managers can now offer U.S.-based corporate customers a more robust payables solution that is designed to increase productivity and profits with enhanced security while simplifying the entire payments process.

"As we remain committed to driving value and innovation for both our customers and the industry, we are happy to be working with Citizens to help them offer a commercial payments solution designed to meet their unique needs and differentiate them in the marketplace," said Shari Krikorian, Vice President, MasterCard Worldwide. "By integrating and automating business-to-business payment processing, the MasterCard Payment Gateway will allow Citizens to deliver significant benefits to their commercial customers as well as buyers and suppliers."