LTIMindtree has announced the appointment of industry veteran Venu Lambu as the new chief executive officer of the India-based global technology consulting and digital solutions company, effective immediately.
Working out of the London office, Lambu’s appointment “signals a major step in the company’s leadership succession plan,” LTIMindtree said in a statement shared with QA Financial.
The CEO change comes after a disastrous year for LTIMindtree, with its stock plummeting, an exodus of managers and a slowing demand.

Therefore, S. N. Subrahmanyan, chairman of LTIMindtree was keen to stress the strategic importance of the leadership change.
“This move reflects our dedication to ensuring a seamless transition, while preserving the company’s legacy and positioning ourselves for future opportunities,” he said.
Prior to joining LTIMindtree, Lambu served as the CEO of Randstad Digital, the $3 billion digital arm of Randstad.
His previous roles include serving as president & executive director at Mindtree, where he led the company’s global markets transformation, contributing to its sustained profitable growth. Lambu has held senior positions at major technology firms including Cognizant, HCL Technologies, and IBM.
In the coming months, Lambu will work with departing CEO and managing director Debashis Chatterjee during the leadership transition. “This period will allow Lambu to familiarize himself with the company’s operations, strategic goals, and financial plans for the year,” the company wrote.
Tough year
Rumours that CEO Debashis Chatterjee would be pushed out early 2025 were growing during the second half of 2024 following the resignation of chief financial officer Vinit Teredesai.
He was replaced by Vipul Chandra, who has been with the company since 2013 and is also a former finance chief of Larsen and Toubro.
“Leadership planning is one of the key focus areas of our group,” stressed LTIMindtree’s chairman following Chandra’s appointment.

The change in CFO came amid reports that current CEO Debashis Chatterjee would not be offered another term this year.
Several news outlets, including Reuters, reported at the end of last year hat LTIMindtree had already poached two candidates internally to run for the job.
LTIMindtree experienced a difficult year in 2024. Its stock has been down by more than 17 per cent since January of last year, largely due to concerns over integration challenges, a range of management exits and a slowdown in demand.
In the last 12 months, close to a dozen senior managers left the company, mostly in the run-up to the merger with L&T.
In India, it was labelled as the worst-performing large cap IT company during the January-March period of last year.
When approached by QA Financial, a spokesman for the company at the Mumbai headquarters declined to respond to discuss the management changes or the company’s strategy but one thing the company managed to do is to sit at the heart of the global trend to embrace artificial intelligence.
The Indian software giant is allocating larger sums than most to AI, as its chief operating officer, Nachiket Deshpande, emphasised the tech’s pivotal role in boosting productivity and operational efficiency.
“AI in everything, AI for everyone, and everything in AI,” Deshpande said, as he disclosed that his company is currently involved in more than 140 GenAI investment projects, many of them in relation to QA testing and software development.
Although Deshpand believes it is vital to maintain “a human in the middle” approach to ensure any successful implementation of AI, he does think firms should rush to catch up with their rivals in the global race for GenAI dominance.
In fact, the vast majority of all of LTIMindtree’s clients around the world, up to 95%, are planning to invest in generative AI within the next 12 to 18 months, the industry insider told India’s FE newspaper.
“Based on our research and surveys, all our customers are gearing up to integrate GenAI in the near term,” Deshpand stated.
“Many have already executed proof of concepts and are now in a phase of understanding the precise implementations needed for their enterprises.”
“‘All, and I mean all, our clients are investing in GenAI.”
– Nachiket Deshpande
Moreover, practically every business deal at LTIMindtree now touches includes “some AI elements” while the number of GenAI-powered solutions it has rolled out, so far, stands at around 40, most of them focused on software projects in the financial services space, most prominently insurance, Deshpande said.
“Every service that we offer is being reimagined with AI. This isn’t just about having AI projects; it’s about embedding AI into the fabric of all our services,” he continued.
“However, the broad adoption of AI technologies is not without challenges, particularly around data security, regulatory compliance, and the need for robust infrastructure,” Deshpande noted.
What clients are mostly asking about is how productivity and efficiency can be improved, so most of the firm’s testing solutions, underpinned by AI, focus on those targets.

“AI can potentially create massive positive disruptions, so our approach has been what we call is ‘AI in everything, AI for everyone and Everything in AI’. So we are reimagining every single business process to see how it can be enhanced with AI,” Deshpande said.
He stressed this includes everything from planning and forecasting to designing and testing.
The IT major has successfully launched 25 ‘Customer Zero’ use cases, where AI solutions are deployed internally before being rolled out to clients.
Additionally, there are 10 AI use cases already in production, impacting various domains such as talent supply chain management, delivery excellence, and cybersecurity.
Deshpande said that as AI is being integrated, some human roles will become redundant, suggesting that “not as many employees will be needed for the same tasks due to increased productivity.”
Nevertheless, he was keen to stress that his company will be maintaining a “human in the middle” approach to ensure the successful implementation of AI, indicating that “human oversight remains essential even as some job functions are automated or enhanced by AI technologies.”
At the end of March, LTIMindtree’s payroll included a staggering 81,650 people, although the multinational’s workforce did drop by 2,896 people compared to a year ago.
QA hurdles
As LTIMindtree has firmly recognised, quality assurance processes are increasingly led by AI-powered tools and solutions, and software testing at most finance firms is no longer merely carried out manually by human developers and engineers.
However, the implementation of AI tech in banks’ digital infrastructure may not be as straightforward as it seems or many industry players make us believe.
“Many banks still rely on core banking platforms from a bygone era of technology, making integration with modern applications a delicate dance,” stressed Rahul Chaudhari, the founder and CEO of software testing solution provider Qualitia Software.
He does agree AI and automation can help banking and financial institutions “conquer software development challenges” but argues it’s “a balancing act.”
“Cost, time, talent, and accuracy, these are the constant hurdles banks face in their software development sprints,” Chaudhari said.
He said that, beneath the sleek interfaces of mobile wallets and other tech-driven apps, lies “a complex web of software development, riddled with challenges that threaten to delay progress.”
“Traditional manual testing methods, while crucial, are simply not thorough enough in today’s complex software landscape.”
– Rahul Chaudhari
Chaudhari defines one of the biggest roadblocks as “the heterogeneity burden” as he pointed out that legacy environments are often rife with technical debt, making them brittle and expensive to maintain.
“Even minor code changes in these heterogeneous systems can have cascading effects, slowing down development cycles and increasing the risk of errors,” he stressed.
And it does not end there.
Despite automated testing experiencing a huge uptake, humans are still very much part of the process. Therefore, the lack of global talent is not helping.
“Finding skilled software developers, especially those with expertise in banking and financial regulations and security, is a constant battle,” Chaudhari said.

“This scarce talent pool directly translates to longer development times and higher project costs. The demand for specialists in areas like security testing, performance testing, and compliance testing far outstrips supply.”
Another major challenge for many financial services firms is the use of testing data, or its accuracy rather.
“Accuracy is paramount when dealing with financial data. A single bug in a banking or financial application can have devastating consequences, both financial and reputational damages,” Chaudhari noted.
“Traditional manual testing methods, while crucial, are simply not thorough enough in today’s complex software landscape,” he stated.
Moreover, time constraints often lead to incomplete testing, creating a ticking time bomb for potential errors after launch.
“Manual testing suffers from inherent limitations, including subjectivity, repeatability issues, and inability to handle the growing complexity of modern applications,” Chaudhari said.
The long and costly road to automation
As the digital infrastructure and the use of apps and other online features that banks and other financial services firms us are growing fast, firms are keen to test more, and better.
Automated testing is therefore rapidly gaining momentum, as its scope and reach can simply not be matched by human developers who test manually.
Moreover, the afore-mentioned skills shortage further drives the appetite for automated testing solutions.
“In this high-stakes environment, having test automation emerges as a potential game-changer,” Chaudhari said.
“By automating repetitive testing tasks such as functional testing and regression testing, banks can free up valuable developer time and resources,” he continued.
“Imagine a scenario where account opening processes, and many others, are no longer manually tested hundreds of times, but handled by automated process scripts that can run overnight, flagging potential errors with higher accuracy,” he said.
“This not only reduces the time and cost of testing but also allows for more frequent releases, accelerating the time-to-market and business opportunity loss,” Chaudhari continued.
“The demand for specialists in areas like security testing, performance testing, and compliance testing far outstrips supply.”
– Rahul Chaudhari
To Chaudhari, more automated testing is simply a win-win situation as “the benefits extend beyond efficiency.”
Like many others within the industry, Chaudhari reasons that “automation empowers banks to adhere to the ever-changing regulatory landscape to save precious time to market.”
He pointed out that “test scripts can be constantly updated to reflect new compliance requirements, ensuring software remains compliant with Know Your Customer (KYC) norms and other regulations.”
Additionally, with modern tools available today, 80% of the defects can be found and corrected during the Quality Assurance process itself, Chaudhari continued, instead of in the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) time, a practice widely advocated by us for its ability to improve software quality and reduce time-to-market for their customers.
“Today, such tools offer real AI and real automation, with added advantage of digital traceability in this complex regulated environment, thus making them the clear winner,” he noted.
Embracing automation
Despite global efforts to embrace automated testing solutions, particularly in the US, Europe and rapidly evolving markets such as India, widespread adoption remains a challenge with the latest technologies prevalent in the market.
As a result, many banks, insurance firms and other financial institutions are building partnerships to augment their in-house expertise to develop and maintain robust automation suites.
“By embracing automated AI based software testing, financial institutions can bridge the gap between innovation and stability,” Chaudhari argued.
“It is time to move away from the tightrope walk and step onto a path of faster, more secure, and cost-effective software development,” he added.
“Those who take the leap first will reap the rewards.”
However, this process does mean significant more investment is needed, with concerns around initial investment costs and the need for skilled personnel to manage automation tools often cited as roadblocks.
“These hurdles can be overcome by partnering with those innovative product and service providers who are delivering such solutions,” Chaudhari said.
He is convinced that most investments can be quickly recouped with at least 60% cost and time reduction in testing time and bug fixing costs leading to significant financial benefits.
“The real savings are not just in cost of testing, but in value of deployment ahead of competition, potentially bug free,” Chaudhari claimed.
In summary, to him, “the future of banking belongs to those who can innovate rapidly and deliver exceptional customer experiences. By accelerating their adoption of automation, banks and financial institutions can ensure they stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving digital landscape.”
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