From AI disruption and regulatory pressure to cultural transformation and risk-centric testing, senior voices from banks, healthcare and technology firms reflected a year of profound change in quality assurance.
In 2025 quality assurance and software testing in banking, financial services and adjacent sectors such as healthcare were defined by a profound reckoning with the scale, pace and implications of technological change.
Conversations at QA Financial events and in industry commentary throughout the year made clear that QA leaders are wrestling not just with tools and techniques, but with strategic questions about risk, culture, regulation and the purpose of testing itself.
Across forums in London, New York and healthcare-focused gatherings, CEOs, senior technologists and industry figures voiced concerns and aspirations that together defined the year’s narrative.
Innovation meets risk
One of the most frequently cited themes was the transformational impact, and attendant uncertainty, of artificial intelligence on QA.
Asad Khan, founder and CEO of LambdaTest, articulated the shift plainly: “QA has evolved from traditional automation testing to AI-powered testing orchestration, from tedious bug reporting to AI-driven root cause analysis and from manual trends forecasts to predictive analytics. And now we’re looking at AI-native testing agents.”
This encapsulated a widely shared recognition that AI isn’t peripheral, it is reshaping the very definition and work flow of quality assurance.
Tal Barmeir, co-founder and CEO of BlinqIO, reflected a related but more cautionary view on how generative AI will alter work within QA.
“I think that, in the next five years, GenAI will remove a lot of the tedious parts of work and allow humans to manage and take strategic decisions rather than run around their tails trying to deliver tonnes of work against deadlines,” Barmeir stressed.
Her comments highlighted both the promise of automation and the strategic rebalancing of roles that senior leaders are grappling with.
At this year’s QA Financial & E-Commerce Forum in London, senior practitioners went beyond abstract optimism.
Nasdaq’s Sudeepta Guchhait described practical use of AI in production systems with unvarnished realism: “Believe me, we have not achieved 100 % coverage… our customers will never give their data to us, so we generate our own.”
He added that with a long-term horizon in mind, the aim is nothing less than “a zero-defect vision.” These remarks underscored how institutions are trying to apply AI in regulated environments where data privacy and fault tolerance are non-negotiable.
QA as a pillar of resilience
Regulatory concern about software risk was an equally persistent theme. Santosh Pandit, senior regulator at the UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority, captured the industry’s shift in mindset: “Software is the single most important risk that businesses will need to manage in the future.”
His statement, delivered at the QA Financial Forum London, reflected regulators’ explicit elevation of software quality and risk into the heart of supervisory expectations. The implications are deep: QA is no longer a behind-the-scenes engineering activity, it is a cornerstone of systemic resilience.
Meanwhile, Citi’s Jason Morris, Head of Developer Pipelines, tied culture to competitive quality outcomes when he said in London: “It is a cultural barrier, not a regulatory one.”
For Morris and his team, the challenge isn’t merely compliance but embedding decisive QA outcomes: “Yes/no, go/no-go. We need to think less about test automation, more about software engineering.”
His remarks reveal how senior engineering leaders are reframing quality assurance as an operational imperative rather than a siloed process.
Senior practitioners at financial firms also spoke directly to day-to-day pressures that can keep QA leads awake at night.
At the QA Financial Forum Chicago in 2025, Anuradha Veeravalli Murali, Senior Manager, Quality Engineering at Discover Financial Services, highlighted the complex intersection of cloud transformation, governance and tooling as a core challenge for her team, even before the overlay of AI and regulation.
In her session on cloud-based transformation programs, she explained how her team manages test environments and embeds enterprise governance into QA decisions.
Similarly, Minh Sprengeler, Senior Solutions Engineer at Perforce, emphasised that QA teams are evolving from gatekeepers to strategic partners.
His session in New York articulated how AI can reduce manual effort, accelerate delivery cycles, and maintain control over risk, but only if teams adopt a proactive posture toward automation rather than retrofitting tools onto legacy work flows.
Healthcare quality and connected systems
Voices from the healthcare domain brought additional texture to the QA discourse in 2025.
At the QA Financial Healthcare & Insurance Forum, Kartik Taneja, Business Intelligence and Automation Lead at the NHS, described the complexity of testing in a federated digital ecosystem.
“It is not a monolithic organisation,” he said. “You can think of it as a federation of organisations, more than 100 organisations to be accurate.”
His remarks reminded QA leaders that scale and structure matter, and that testing in heterogeneous environments demands connected, interoperable quality strategies.
Amid all the excitement and anxiety about AI and regulation, some senior commentators called for grounded prioritisation.
Amanda Sundara, General Manager at TestRail, observed a shift in mindset across the profession: “While headlines champion AI-led testing revolutions, this year’s response reflects a shift toward maturity and realism.”
Her comments reflected a broader move among QA professionals to balance innovation with pragmatism, fine-tuning processes, expanding skillsets and managing complexity with confidence.
Through these voices from 2025, from CEOs of tooling firms to senior QA managers at global banks and healthcare organisations, the overarching narrative is clear: quality assurance has arrived at the nexus of technology, regulation and business risk.
As organisations integrate AI, adopt cloud architectures and respond to regulatory frameworks like DORA, QA leaders increasingly find themselves at the pivot point of strategic decisions. And the candid, high-level remarks from this past year signal that the discipline will only grow in visibility, scope and impact in the years ahead.
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REGULATION & COMPLIANCE
Looking for more news on regulations and compliance requirements driving developments in software quality engineering at financial firms? Visit our dedicated Regulation & Compliance page here.
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