American retail banks will spend $16.6 billion on "digital transformation initiatives" this year, according to research from IDC Financial Insights.

Mariner Investment Group, the alternative investment manager, has appointed Dmitry Green as Chief Risk Officer. Mr. Green has managed investment risk at a number of blue chip alternative investment firms, and joins Mariner from Saba Capital where he was MD and CRO.

Mr. Green will be responsible for monitoring investment risk across all of Mariner's businesses. He will be a member of the firm's Investment and Risk committees, and will report directly to Mariner's operating committee.

Singapore has committed S$225 million over the next five years to a scheme designed to build a vibrant ecosystem for innovation in fintech.

Citi announced today the release of its completely redesigned Citi Mobile® App for iPhone® in the U.S. The new app for consumer banking and credit card customers enables the use of the Touch ID feature on iPhone devices, integrates with Apple Watch™ and adds new features responding to customer feedback and changing behaviors.

AIM Software, a global software provider of Enterprise Data Management (EDM) solutions for financial and securities institutions worldwide, today announced the appointment of Marco Sablone as Director of Sales for the North American Market.

Markit (Nasdaq: MRKT), a leading global diversified provider of financial information services, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Information Mosaic, a leading software provider for corporate actions and post trade securities processing.

The Information Mosaic business is being integrated into Markit’s Solutions division and will be led by Paul Taylor, managing director, reporting to Michele Trogni, managing director and cohead of Solutions. 

I was upset to be unable to join the recent debate in New York on digital banking.  It ended up that I was conflicted and had to defer to a far mightier second man, Ron Shevlin. 

Ron obviously was a stand-out star of the discussion in that not only did he win the debate with Michal Panowicz as his tag team partner, but he also got a lot of coverage of his rap:

Don't be a fool,
Fintech don't rule.
No doubt they're cool.
But they're just a bank's tool.

Pensions are back in the headlines and flavour of the month online. In March 2015, Google Trends in the UK saw a spike in the number of searches for ‘pensions’ and related terms, as the deadline for reform approached.

So what do customers want to know about their pensions? And can pension providers offer accurate rather than an estimated view of pension performance?

New online calculators launched by firms such as Standard Life, Hargreaves Lansdown and Fidelity indicate that providers think customers want to know two key facts:

Tonight’s addition of a single second to system clocks will no doubt underwhelm the world, much as Y2K did – systems will probably not fail (although the last time a leap second was added – in 2012 – there were in fact system outages).  But this fascinating phenomenon, whereby “Coordinated Universal Time” (UTC) is tweaked so that it more closely matches mean solar time (so-called “UT1”) – based on the earth’s rotation – potentially disrupts the rational determinism of global computer systems.

Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, announced today the introduction of the Elektron API  family, a set of open-source Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that simplify access to Thomson Reuters data feeds and services, and help developers to innovate by creating their own customised applications. The Elektron API family consists of a broad set of interfaces ranging from low latency/high performance to simple content aware and web APIs.