QA and software testing leaders from across Canada’s banking and financial services sector gathered for what organisers described as “Canada’s #1 software quality management conference” and “the only conference with a clear focus on quality engineering and testing at Canada’s leading financial firms”.
With speakers from major institutions including RBC, TD, Scotiabank, CIBC, EQ Bank, Wealthsimple, Definity and Canada Life, the QA Financial Forum Toronto 2026, which took place April, 23, focused on how AI, data and regulatory pressure are reshaping quality engineering in real time.
Sponsors were given prominent visibility throughout the event, with Gold sponsors Amdocs, Perforce and Tricentis joined by Bronze sponsors K2view and TTC.
Their presence in Toronto underlined the commercial and strategic weight now attached to quality engineering as financial firms look for practical answers around AI adoption, cloud delivery, test data and digital resilience.
The day opened formally with Matthew Crabbe, the CEO of QA Financial, the company behind this website, welcoming delegates before conducting the keynote interview with Diederik van Liere, Chief Technology Officer, Wealthsimple.
That session focused on “the adoption of AI technologies in robo-wealth management, and how they can be effectively tested,” while also looking at how Wealthsimple is handling the technology challenges involved in becoming “better than your bank”.
That opening conversation led directly into one of the central themes of the day: the growing impact of AI on software testing and quality engineering.
A leadership panel featuring Abhijit Banerjee, Director, Technical Solutions – Digital Assurance, Canada Life, Roxana Bayat, Senior Director, DevOps, Platform Tools & QEX, RBC, Roland Castelino, Senior Manager of QA and Tech Platform Lead, BMO, and Dinesh Thandapany, Head of Solution Architecture & Quality Engineering, Tangerine Bank examined how AI agents and LLMs are revolutionising how testing and quality engineering is managed at financial firms.
The discussion centred on how firms are benchmarking return on investment, building AI-based platforms for risk-based testing, and dealing with the increasingly urgent issue of “testing the outputs of AI”.
Release speed
Another major talking point was the challenge of releasing software at speed without losing control.
In his session, Matt Butler, Enterprise Account Executive, Perforce, argued that “Most financial services teams don’t have a testing problem, they have a confidence problem.”
He pointed to the combination of legacy systems, unstable dependencies, regulatory demands and constant pressure to move faster as the reason “confidence in what’s going to production becomes increasingly fragile”. His message was that the issue is not effort, but structure: “The challenge isn’t effort, it’s control.”
The conference also explored how AI is forcing firms to rethink the foundations of quality engineering itself. Dror Avrilingi, Amdocs studios CTO & Head of QE Studio, Amdocs, spoke about what he describes as the “Quality Breakpoint”, arguing that “traditional quality assurance approaches were not designed for systems that generate code, make decisions, and continuously adapt”.
His session looked at how firms can maintain trust and confidence as systems become more autonomous and dynamic.
Data and compliance formed another major pillar of the programme. A panel featuring Abhijeet Das, Practice Lead – Quality Engineering, TD Bank, Harish Srivastava, Director Quality Engineering (Performance and Test Data Management), RBC Wealth Management, Kulas Angeles, Director, Software Quality Engineering, Sun Life, and Benaz Shali, Senior Quality Engineering Executive (in transition), formerly CIBC addressed the challenge of connecting sensitive, regulated data to cloud-based testing environments.
Questions including “How do you get the authenticated data in the test pipeline, without leakage?” and “How do you ensure GRC requirements are met?” resonated strongly with delegates trying to balance delivery speed with governance and compliance obligations.
“Most financial services teams don’t have a testing problem, they have a confidence problem.”
– Matt Butler, Perforce
One of the standout sessions in the afternoon came from Srini Chelian, VP & Head of Technology, Personal Lines, Definity, whose talk focused on how Definity is using AI to “build better, faster, and more cost-effective technology solutions”.
Chelian made clear that Definity is seeing the strongest gains in “the testing phase and the planning phase”, while describing quality engineering as “low hanging fruit” because of the structured nature of the work and the depth of historical data available.
He said: “It significantly reduces our execution times… which means our release frequency is more and the quality is more.”
But in a recent podcast (below) he also cautioned against stopping at surface-level gains, warning: “That in itself does not guarantee the business value delivery… you’re still in that journey where you can then translate this to reimagine that SDLC cycle.”
Chelian also pushed delegates to think beyond simple efficiency gains and towards broader operating model change.
“Your technology or the operations cost cannot grow linearly with the business growth because then you’re not actually running a profitable business,” he said, linking AI transformation to platform strategy and cost discipline.
Looking ahead, he raised the prospect of a mixed human-machine QA model, saying: “Is the future a hybrid workforce where you’ve got agents testing and you’ve got humans testing? We absolutely need to think about a hybrid workforce.”
Payments
Payments was another major theme on today’s agenda. A dedicated panel featuring Leonid Chernyshov, Senior Manager, Quality Assurance Automation – Cards Engineering, Scotiabank, Braulio Lam, Senior Director of Engineering, EQ Bank, Joanne Tsianos, Senior Vice President – Portfolio Head of Design Corporate Payments, US Bank, and Chandni Tibrewal, Senior Software QE Manager, Moneris looked at the testing demands created by Canada’s Real-Time Rail and the wider move to open banking.
Organisers described the new platform as “possibly the single major change to Canada’s financial infrastructure planned for 2026”, making this one of the most forward-looking discussions of the day.
Topics included API testing, ISO 20022, user experience, compliance and the management of complexity and security at scale.
Later in the afternoon, the focus shifted to the role of the quality engineer in a more automated, AI-led delivery environment. Bill Hayden, Enterprise Alliance Architect, Tricentis, argued that “as QE professionals, we are the last line of defense against these decisions”.
His session warned against over-automation and examines what it means to be AI-ready in a world where human judgement still matters.
The final session of the day brought resilience, incident management and compliance into sharper focus.
Speakers including Jeff Ovsey, Director, Environment Management / Test Data Transformation, CIBC, Rachna Patel Sohi, Director, Enterprise Resilience, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Satwant Pannu, Senior Vice President, IT Operations & Security, OPTrust discussed how firms are responding to increasing regulatory scrutiny around software risk, third-party exposure, observability and enterprise reporting.
The discussion addressed how DevOps connects more directly to resilience metrics, incident response and risk-based management of technology assets.
“Traditional quality assurance approaches were not designed for systems that generate code, make decisions, and continuously adapt.”
– Dror Avrilingi
Throughout the programme, the emphasis remained firmly on real-world practice rather than abstract theory.
Organisers said the agenda was built around “how organisations are actually applying automation, test data strategies and AI responsibly in production environments, and what that means for governance, compliance and business outcomes.”
That made the Toronto event not just another industry gathering, but a live snapshot of where software quality in financial services is heading.
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