2025 was a standout year for QA Financial’s global Forum events, uniting quality assurance, software testing, automation and risk professionals from banking, insurance, capital markets and healthcare to confront the most pressing engineering, compliance and innovation challenges of the era.
From London to Toronto and Chicago, and capped by the first‑ever Healthcare & Insurance Forum in London, practitioners and leaders converged to share hard‑won insights on how AI, data, automation, regulatory scrutiny and resilience intersect with the evolving mandate for high‑quality engineering.
2025 was a year in which QA Financial’s global Forum series charted both the evolution of quality assurance practice and the real‑world challenges of automation, AI adoption, data readiness, compliance, and interoperability across regulated sectors.
Beginning in North America with Toronto and Chicago, moving through London’s financial QA gathering, and closing with the inaugural Healthcare & Insurance Forum in London, the sequence of events offered QA professionals a panoramic view of how quality engineering must evolve to meet modern demands.
Toronto
The year began with the QA Financial Forum Toronto 2025 on March 25, a early‑year gathering where software quality leaders from banks, insurers and technology firms explored core trends shaping the QA landscape.
The Toronto agenda highlighted central themes that would ripple through the rest of the year: automated testing, agentic AI, test data management, and regulatory scrutiny in financial services technology contexts.
Delegates were brought together to share their experiences with evolving test frameworks that aim to balance innovation with compliant, risk‑aligned quality assurance practices. Senior practitioners emphasised that emerging AI tooling was not merely a novelty but a platform for driving “future‑ready QA practices” that could embed quality deeply into delivery lifecycles.
Chicago
Just two days later, the QA Financial Forum Chicago 2025 on March 27 reinforced these themes with deeper technical explorations and case studies rooted in enterprise environments.
A panel led by Tavis Addison, Director of Business Process Optimization at Volkswagen Credit, Najat Mazroua, Senior Manager of Testing and Strategy at McDonald’s, and Preeti Gupta, Executive Manager and Senior Director at BNY Mellon, interrogated what it means to adopt AI‑driven quality assurance and robotic process automation in legacy environments.
The panel considered not just tooling but the organisational readiness required to absorb these technologies and align them with risk and compliance frameworks.
Hod Rotem, Chief Product Evangelist at K2view, demonstrated how synthetic and masked data remains essential to building secure test environments that satisfy regulatory privacy requirements while fuelling faster delivery.
Joe Hesse, Senior Account Executive at OpenText, addressed the perennial challenge of reconciling speed with compliance.
He explained how embedding security considerations into DevSecOps, especially when augmented with AI, can help QA teams accelerate innovation without compromising quality or security.
His session underscored that “AI‑driven DevSecOps improves quality assurance, reduces vulnerabilities, and also streamlines workflows,” illustrating that agile delivery methods can be compatible with robust quality practices.
As cloud adoption deepened, Anuradha Veeravalli Murali, Senior Manager, Quality Engineering at Discover Financial Services, spoke about how her team manages cloud‑based test environments and embed enterprise governance standards into QA tooling decisions.
Kerilyn O’Donnell, Vice President of Business Applications at Ryan Specialty, emphasised how a “quality first” mindset transforms day‑to‑day QA practice, especially as organisations migrate workloads and data to the cloud.
Delegates also heard from Clinton Sprauve, Director of Product Marketing at Perforce, who illustrated how AI‑driven validation with natural language prompts can enhance the testing of data‑driven graphics such as complex financial charts, showing that automation can relieve human teams from mundane verification tasks while maintaining accuracy.
Sara Volden, Quality Assurance Leader at GreatAmerica Financial Services, outlined a methodical, incremental strategy for migrating legacy systems, migrating function by function to Salesforce, emphasising that “we decided to move the process function by function,” to ensure QA and business continuity were tightly aligned.
Meanwhile, Anand Chawda, Director and Head of Quality Engineering at RBC Capital Markets, unpacked how strategic QA practices like “Shift Left” must integrate with enterprise reporting, risk, and operational goals.
Amuthan Ganeshan, Principal Software Architect at a US bank, showcased how natural language coding and AI‑driven test case generation can redefine acceptance criteria embedding directly into DevOps pipelines.
The day closed with Dan Belasich, Senior Software Engineer in Test at Enova International, discussing how monorepo platforms can undergird scalable automation and integrated QA workflows across the enterprise.
London
By the time the community reconvened for the QA Financial & E‑Commerce Forum London 2025 on September 18, delegates were ready for a conversation not only about tooling and techniques but about the strategic role of quality engineering under regulatory and systemic risk pressures.
The keynote from Santosh Pandit, a senior regulator at the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority, set the tone by reframing software risk as a core concern in financial resilience: “Software is the single most important risk that businesses will need to manage in the future.”
This perspective elevated the QA dialogue from technical execution to systemic risk management, emphasising that quality engineering is central to institutional stability.
Across sessions, the London audience heard how test data remains a persistent bottleneck. Boris Bulanov, Field CTO at K2view, insisted that despite decades of progress, “Test data is at the very bottom of the stack… it’s slow, it’s not reliable, and it can be dramatically improved.”
He emphasised that improving data readiness can dramatically accelerate release velocity.
Sudeepta Guchhait, Senior Director of Product Framework & Quality Engineering at Nasdaq, illustrated how innovation in performance and resilience testing platforms is already reshaping practice in capital markets contexts.
He explained, “we have not achieved 100% coverage… our customers will never give their data to us, so we generate our own,” and noted that AI‑based analysis now reduces work that once took hours to “just 30–40 minutes.” Guchhait outlined a long‑term ambition, “a zero‑defect vision.”
Scaling automation was also a major London theme. Tal Barmeir, CEO and co‑founder of BlinqIO, demonstrated how AI test engineers can rapidly build Playwright automation projects, but emphasised the long‑term challenge of maintainability: “The small problem is to create the test automation… the main problem is that after a year, half of it is failing.”
Barmeir stressed the importance of transparent, portable code: “All the code is your code. There is nothing proprietary, no black box.”
Panel discussions explored the practical realities of adopting AI in regulated environments. Tim Gould of Nationwide recounted how AI facilitated regression testing on legacy migrations, noting that “AI looks like an accelerant until it becomes an accelerant for a fire,” a caution that resonated with practitioners aware that automation can both speed work and amplify risk.
Bogdan Grigorescu of Direct Line Group underscored the audit readiness imperative: “We have to have proof about every change that we do, because we are audited.”
Meanwhile, Sally Samadi, partner at Stephenson Harwood, connected these operational concerns with broader regulatory thrusts, observing that “this discussion mirrors what legislation is trying to do … to create a more risk‑based approach.”
The London agenda also tackled next‑generation agentic AI strategies. Subu Desaraju of iceDQ argued that reactive checks are insufficient, saying, “You can only detect what you define up front,” and advocating for multi‑agentic approaches that can adapt to drift and operate in coordinated parallel.
Presenters from Perforce emphasised how automation can mimic human visual reasoning: “If you can see it on the screen, you can test it. Literally, it’s like automating a manual test.”
Jason Morris of Citi brought an organisational lens to the conversation, asserting that the real barriers to QA transformation are often cultural rather than regulatory: “It is a cultural barrier, not a regulatory one,” and urging engineering teams to focus on outcomes with crisp decisions: “Yes/no, go/no‑go. We need to think less about test automation, more about software engineering.”
Risk‑based testing and management dashboards also featured, with Roman Zednik of Tricentis noting that the goal is to enable informed go‑live decisions with real‑time insights: “The goal is to have a QA dashboard to make management decisions on ‘can we go live or no’?”
Ameet Deshpande and Sudip Dasgupta argued that adaptive strategies are overtaking brittle regression suites, with Dasgupta emphasising that “we’re going to build a more complex bank with a fraction of the team, simply because of the power the new tools are giving us,” while Deshpande reminded delegates that “your testing strategy has to be highly adaptive.”
Representatives from Schroders reflected on internal platform evolution to reduce technical debt and improve productivity, with executives explaining how they sought to “simplify and standardise” complex environments and build platforms that engineers choose rather than are forced to use.
The day concluded with a keynote from Limor Gueta of Amdocs Quality Engineering, who stressed that AI adoption must be grounded in trust: “Only once we have enough trust in it, we will move it to the agentic experience.”
Healthcare Forum
Closing out the year, the first QA Healthcare & Insurance Forum London 2025 on November 26 expanded the QA Financial agenda into sectors where quality engineering has direct implications on patient outcomes and human wellbeing as well as business performance.
As automation and AI reshape healthcare and insurance IT landscapes, QA teams in these sectors convened to confront the dual imperatives of safety, data privacy, interoperability and regulatory compliance.
The Forum brought together leaders from organisations such as Simplyhealth, Bupa, Vitality, AstraZeneca and the NHS to explore how QA disciplines must adapt.
Tim Gough, Chief Technology Officer at Simplyhealth, shared how his organisation has transformed claims automation, presenting a vision for QA practice embedded in strategic transformation rather than isolated testing tasks. Delegates also engaged with discussions on how AI can be applied to sensitive data challenges.
AI’s transformative potential was further underscored by directors of sales engineering and test generation platforms capable of self‑healing test environments, pointing toward how pharmaceutical software development could evolve over the coming decade.
The Forum’s presentations included Kartik Taneja, Business Intelligence and Automation Lead at the NHS, who outlined a vision for “agentic AI,” autonomous systems capable of decision‑making and decision support across federated healthcare data systems, a model that could significantly enhance interoperability and patient outcomes in a fragmented healthcare landscape.
After Vishali Khiroya’s session on AI‑driven testing and automation, the Forum continued exploring deep practical and strategic quality engineering challenges. Amitai Richman, Director of Product Marketing at K2view, provided one of the most talked‑about perspectives on data strategy for regulated environments.
He delivered a clear message about where the greatest risk and opportunity lie in healthcare and insurance QA, arguing that “test data is one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in healthcare and insurance” and explaining that without fixing PHI‑safe test data at the source, organisations cannot secure lower environments, automate delivery, or trust AI‑driven systems.
Richman’s insights highlighted that “mostly compliant still leaves sensitive data exposed” and that moving to production‑like, compliant datasets is critical for both regulatory adherence and agile delivery pipelines.
Panel discussions also broadened the conversation to cover insurtech, interoperability, and integration challenges. In one expert panel focused on insurance automation, leaders such as Lee Kivell, Director of Architecture and Engineering at Vitality, joined peers including Jay Chitnis, Director of Insurance at Visa, to unpack real‑world challenges and opportunities.
They explored how insurers and healthcare providers are integrating DevOps and QA to streamline end‑to‑end testing across complex ecosystems, how AI can accelerate claims automation without sacrificing compliance, and how to manage data sensitivity while maintaining agility and speed.
Their dialogue reflected that “when insurers and healthcare providers connect payers and providers, quality engineering must ensure oversight as systems grow more hybrid and complex.”
Accessibility and inclusive design also remained prominent. Alex Jacobs, Head of Test Practice at Gallagher, emphasised that beyond compliance, accessibility is becoming an essential aspect of quality.
He noted that “it is a challenge… legislation, regulation, things like that, they do give us a bit of an ability to sort of lean on and say, hey, look, this is something we need to do here.” Jacobs’ comments reinforced that QA strategies must now include socio‑technical factors such as inclusive UX testing alongside traditional functional and performance metrics.
As the Forum drew to a close, delegates left with a multifaceted picture of how quality assurance frameworks in healthcare and insurance must evolve.
The sessions made it clear that while automation and AI present extraordinary opportunities to accelerate testing and improve coverage, they also introduce new demands for data privacy, interoperability, human oversight and regulatory alignment that cannot be met by tooling alone.
Quality engineering, in this context, means not only finding defects faster, but designing test processes that can deliver trustworthy, compliant systems at scale, systems that ultimately influence not just customer satisfaction or business continuity, but user safety and patient outcomes in a sector where the consequences of failure are human.
Overall, the QA Financial Healthcare & Insurance Forum London 2025 demonstrated that QA teams in these sectors are now being asked to operate at the intersection of automation, compliance, and ethical responsibility.
As leaders like Khiroya, Richman, and others articulated throughout the day, quality assurance has become not just a technical discipline but a strategic foundation for resilient, trustworthy, and responsible digital systems in both healthcare and insurance technology.
Taken together, the 2025 QA Financial Forum series offered QA professionals not just insights into the latest technologies and tools, but a strategic roadmap for navigating automation, regulatory demands, cultural transformation, data strategy, and the rising stakes of quality engineering in their respective domains.
Across Toronto, Chicago, London and healthcare contexts, a unified message emerged: quality assurance is now an essential discipline that fuses technical excellence with organisational resilience and regulatory accountability, and its evolution will define how organisations innovate with confidence in the era of AI and digital complexity.
COMING IN 2026
Why not become a QA Financial subscriber?
It’s entirely FREE
* Receive our weekly newsletter every Wednesday * Get priority invitations to our Forum events *
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.
READ MORE
- Leapwork engineering head: Why test automation so often fails to deliver
- World Economic Forum warns financial sector must strengthen AI risk controls
- How Banca Progetto is hard-wiring quality into Italy’s digital banking space
- How Wealthsimple builds quality into the product, not around it
- Digital revamp puts spotlight on internal controls at China Construction Bank
WATCH NOW
QA FINANCIAL PODCASTS
Listen to Sudeepta Guchhait on Nasdaq’s new Mimic AI testing platform
QA Financial sits down with Sudeepta Guchhait, Senior Director of Product Framework & Quality Engineering at Nasdaq
——–
Listen to Wesley Scheffel and Robin Rain on Schroders’ DevOps strategy
We catch up with Wesley Scheffel, Head of Cloud Platform and Product Engineering at Schroders, and Robin Rain, Head of Cloud Platform Architecture
——–
Listen to Citi’s Jason Morris on Lightspeed and the future of continuous delivery
Jason Morris, Head of Developer Pipelines for Securities Markets and Banking at Citi, talks about Lightspeed
