How Gen Z’s expectations are pushing treasury toward real-time finance feat. Citizens
- Gen Z is raising the bar for treasury, expecting payment visibility, transparency, and control to keep pace with real-time money movement.
- Citizens is modernizing banking connectivity, but instant payments also demand earlier fraud checks and better information-sharing across banks, fintechs, and payment providers.
Treasury is facing a moment of reckoning as money moves faster, but the systems around it struggle to keep pace. A company can send a payment in real time and still have to jump between systems to confirm where it went, reconcile the transaction, check account information, or understand what happened next. For treasury teams managing multiple accounts, banks, and payment providers, the problem is that too much of the technology doesn’t talk to each other very well.
Citizens has been tackling part of this problem at the infrastructure level. The bank began rebuilding its open banking framework in 2023 to move away from the patchwork of legacy APIs that made commercial banking connectivity cumbersome. The goal was to create one framework that could serve customers across consumer, small business, private, and commercial banking.
The API’s beta launched in mid-2024, followed by a full launch in Q1 2025. Built on Financial Data Exchange (FDX) standards, the framework uses a multiplexing architecture to determine who is accessing the data, which account they’re accessing, and what permissions they have. That lets fintechs, ERP systems, and other platforms connect through a single, adaptable interface instead of building separate integrations for different parts of the bank.
Citizens says onboarding times have fallen from weeks to minutes, while 96% of its legacy screen-scraping traffic disappeared following the rollout. The API now processes millions of permissioned calls a day, with thousands of business clients across the bank’s business banking, corporate, and private bank divisions accessing their Citizens data through platforms such as Sage, Expensify, Ramp, Carta, AppFolio, and Bill.com.
“By implementing a unified open banking API, we have accelerated the rollout of new features and simplified integration for new platforms,” Michael Cummins, Head of Treasury and Payments Solutions at Citizens, told me in December 2025.
Citizens continues to build on the API, widening the data and services it can support, from enriched transaction details and account activity to corporate loans and corporate cards.
But better connectivity is only part of the shift underway. As real-time payments become more commonplace, expectations are changing around what treasury teams should be able to see and do with a transaction. Younger professionals entering the workforce have grown up with consumer financial apps that make real-time updates feel ordinary. For them, moving money in seconds may be just the starting point. They increasingly expect the information, visibility, and controls around those transactions to keep pace.
Paul Margarites, Head of Product Solutions for Treasury and Wholesale Payments at Citizens, sees Gen Z as accelerating treasury’s move toward real-time finance. I spoke with him about how Citizens is thinking about treasury’s next phase as younger workers bring new expectations around payment speed, transparency, and the information available to them.
When instant becomes the baseline
Q: What changes when “instant” becomes a baseline expectation for the entire treasury function?
Paul Margarites: Once instant is the baseline, speed stops earning credit. Treasury gets judged on everything around the payment: does it just work, and can I see what’s happening with it?
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