The leading networking and information event on the subject of software quality assurance returns to New York for its 8th year. Join us to discuss the latest in software risk management and technologies for quality engineering and DevOps. Featuring speakers from leading banks, insurers and trading firms.
The QA Financial Forum New York
May 24th 2023 at the Harvard Club
The leading networking and information event on the subject of software quality assurance returns to New York next spring.
Free to attend for delegates from financial firms, our audience will hear from experts and pioneers in new QA technologies from banks, insurance companies, exchanges and trading venues.
There will also be presentations on cutting-edge tools for accelerating DevOps and continuous testing from the world's most innovative software technology vendors.
As always, our QA Financial Forum is a discreet meeting place, where ideas are shared confidentially. We allow the maximum time for questions and discussion breaks.
The Forum will cover:
Senior Partner, Head of Strategic Advisory Services – NYC, New York. Gabby brings a wealth of IT experience with her from holding various global positions in telecom, consulting, and financial service organizations. Prior to joining QAC, Gabby Szasz specialized in transforming QA and Development organizations within many of the world’s largest banks. Gabby Szasz recently served as Global CIO of Enterprise Quality Engineering at Wells Fargo Bank.Within Wells Fargo, she championed QA accountability and oversaw the transformation of a 5,000 person QA organization culminating with moving to a de-centralized model. Prior to that, she had similar high-profile QA/Dev position sat BNY Mellon, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America.Gabby is a leading voice for Women in Technology. She is acknowledged as a national leader in the drive to attract women into technology fields. She is active with Power to Fly, Anita Borg Institute (ABI), Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) andWomen in Technology (WIT). She leads conference panels and TED Talks as well as 250+ attendee conferences. She developed the award-winning BNYMellon/WIT High School Internship program and brought the Best Company forWomen Technologists award from ABI to BNY Mellon.
Reuven Ben-Menachem is the founder and former CEO of Fundtech, a leading global provider of software to the fintech industry. In 2015 Fundtech was sold to D+H for $1.25B. Today, Reuven is the chairman of several boards of directors of leading fintech companies as well as social ventures. Reuven has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry, having held executive positions at several leading financial institutions. Reuven founded Fundtech in 1993 with the goal of providing innovative technology solutions to the banking and payments industry. Under his leadership, Fundtech has grown to become a global leader in the financial services technology space, providing solutions to over 1,000 customers in more than 50 countries. Reuven is a recognized leader in the financial services industry, having been named one of the “Top 25 Most Influential People in Banking” by American Banker magazine in 2011. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and has been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Financial Times.
Dror Avrilingi is head of Amdocs Quality Engineering (AQE) International, responsible for accelerating sales growth across EMEA, APAC & CALA regions, and AQE’s Global Strategy. Previously, Dror served as AQE CTO, where he established the division’s innovative “new ways of working”, drove a workforce upskilling program, and managed the R&D team to take the company’s technology portfolio to a new level. Under his leadership, the team registered 13 patents. Earlier, Dror held various roles in AQE in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, including as testing regional lead and AT&T testing delivery lead. Dror is a co-owner of three patents in the quality engineering domain and holds a diploma in practical software engineering from the College of Management, Israel.
Lisa Wolf is Head of Quality Engineering Marketing at Amdocs, responsible for the organization’s global marketing strategy, product marketing, branding, analyst relations and sales enablement. Previously, Lisa established and managed the analyst relations program for Amdocs Global Services, leading the company to be ranked #1 across various domains, including managed services and quality engineering. Prior to this, she led the services practice for Amdocs Corporate Development & Strategy. Earlier, Lisa held several roles in the financial services sector, including VP Private Placements at Credit Suisse First Boston and Corporate Finance Associate at Gerard Klauer Mattison (acquired by Bank of Montreal). Lisa holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Duke University.
Stephen is the Cyber Risk Engineer for Sompo Pro. He joined Sompo Pro in October 2022 and brings over 15 years of cybersecurity consulting experience. In his role, Stephen is responsible for setting the technical guidelines for assessing cybersecurity controls from applicants, assisting in the development of cyber products offerings, and the research of cybersecurity controls for emerging technologies. Prior to joining Sompo, Stephen was a Director of Advisory Services at Arete Advisors and helped companies secure their perimeter, test their operational procedures, and investigate unauthorized access. He has advised clients through ransom negotiations to recover decryption keys and investigate ransomware infections, unauthorized access to and data theft from AWS cloud accounts, and assessed organizations cyber security programs. Stephen also serves as an advisory board member for the Ithaca College Cyber Security Certificate program. His previous employment includes startups specializing in cyber security and artificial intelligence, Deloitte, PwC, and EY. He holds a Masters of Business Administration from Fordham University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from Bentley University.
Shadman Fahim has been involved in meeting the highest standards of quality, functionality, and usability for software in the private wealth management space. His career in the financial industry started in 2017. He has played key roles in digitizing the legacy mobile applications (iOS & Android) and rolling them out to production. Shadman is an experienced individual, with a deep understanding of software testing methodologies, development processes, and mobile application development. His current role as Vice President for PWM Digital at Goldman Sachs, focuses on maintaining high quality, user-friendly software that meets the needs of clients and drives business growth.
Ramkumar Ayyadurai is the Quality Assurance and Test Engineering Director for Equities at Citi. At Citi, his team is responsible for providing Quality Assurance and Engineering services for over 100+ applications globally. Ram is currently leading a multiyear Global QA transformation strategy around migrating away from archaic QA practices to a “Best in class” Test Engineering focused organization. His team is leading the charge around Enterprise Test Automation Framework, Virtualization, DevOps, Containerization, Cloud adoption within Quality Assurance/Test Engineering space. Ram has over 18 years of IT experience and majority of his career in Investment banking across banks including JP Morgan chase (UK), Merrill Lynch (US), Credit Suisse (US). Prior to Citi, Ram led the Quality Assurance function at Credit Suisse – Investment Banking division. During his tenure at Credit Suisse, he has established Industry award winning QA Engineering practices across Equities, Fixed Income, FX, Risk and Trading technologies IT.
Sandesh Gawande is the CTO at Torana Inc. and a serial entrepreneur. Since 1996 Sandesh has been designing products and doing data engineering. He has developed and trademarked a framework for data integration - ETL Interface Architecture®. He has consulted for various Insurance, Banking, and Healthcare. He realized, while companies were investing millions of dollars in their data projects, they were not testing their data pipelines. This caused project delays, huge labor costs, and expensive production fixes. Herein rests the genesis of the iCEDQ platform.
Kenny is an accomplished executive with over 25 years of experience leading successful global teams in both pre- and post-sale technical services. As the driving force behind Parasoft Customer Success, Kenny ensures that customers effectively utilize Parasoft solutions to achieve their business objectives and realize long-term value. Kenny's expertise in Pre-Sales Engineering, Professional Services, and Technical Support has been honed through his leadership roles with esteemed organizations such as KPMG, IBM Global Services, Smarsh, and Micro Focus. In each of these positions, Kenny has delivered exceptional results by leveraging his deep understanding of customer needs, his ability to build high-performing teams, and his knack for creating effective strategies that drive business growth.
Roya Montazeri is Sr Director Technical & QA at Cox Automotive. She is responsible for quality engineering initiatives across Dealertrack organization. She works with agile scrum team, release management, test and performance engineers and Quality Assurance analysts to establish practices and test frameworks for Dealertrack software. Roya has 20+ years of technology leadership experience. Roya is an expert in establishing quality models and processes across large enterprise projects. She has championed quality focus across multiple business units at CA Technology in the past and now at Cox Automotive. She has implemented cross product integrations and established strong rigor around quality metrics and KPI’s. Her laser focus attention to details and execution of highly visible and large projects has earned her a reputation as a “result-getter” amongst her peers.
A Software Engineer with a history of working in Process Automation and Education. At FIS, he is part of the API Center For Enablement, working to promote consistency and quality within the API marketplace. Rolando is the Lead Administrator for the Swaggerhub API Contract Repository and Virtualize Tools within FIS. Working with Parasoft he has established the infrastructure and developed tools to automate as much as possible. Outside of work, he enjoys reading, getting creative in the kitchen, and spending time with his fiance and cat.
Aaron Jensen is a DevOps Advisor for Delphix in addition to managing the Solutions Engineering Team for the East Coast. Based in Nashville, TN, Aaron has over 25 years of experience overseeing transformative technology projects at some of the largest global organizations. Before joining Delphix, Aaron was responsible for building one of the nation’s largest data science labs and implementing development process changes resulting in millions of dollars of annual savings for one the big 4. Prior to that Aaron worked in various Healthcare IT roles where he was instrumental in refactoring software and delivery process improvements for several of the nation’s largest health care organizations. When not at work Aaron and his family enjoy getting as much green time as possible camping, hiking, and stargazing all over the US.
Neil Pradhan is a Lead User Experience Designer at Morgan Stanley, with expertise in applying design thinking principles and human-centered design methodologies to create digital products that drive business growth and improve customer engagement. Experienced in large-scale environments, he has led multiple design initiatives at Fortune 500 companies such as Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, AIG, and PNC Bank, defining their next generation of financial technology products. Neil is passionate about making complex enterprise products easy to use and enabling internal users to perform their job more effectively. At Morgan Stanley, Neil is focused on delivering outstanding UX for Morgan Stanley’s Prime Brokerage and Fund Services business, envisioning, designing and evolving a suite of products including applications for front office sales, middle-office trading activities, back-office operational workflows, and client-facing investor portal. Before that, as a UX Lead at JPMorgan Chase, Neil worked with cross-functional teams to launch new capabilities for internal financial advisors across multiple product lines such as CRM, Portfolio, Alternatives, and Lending on the firm’s digital wealth management platform. Neil mapped out user journeys to understand customer touch points across the eco-system, identified experience gaps, and enabled cross-functional partners to align on a shared vision of the platform. Neil holds a Master’s in human computer Interaction from Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s in Information Technology from Mumbai University. Neil has built an accomplished career in the financial services industry. He has now established himself as an authority on designing fintech products that come from his understanding of where customer needs, business goals and platform capabilities intersect. Neil is excited about the emergence of new disruptive financial technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Workflow Automation, Chatbots, and No-code software that are transforming the financial services industry. He looks forward to advocating for taking a human-centered design approach to developing these technologies and acting as a thought leader to decision makers looking to leverage these fintech solutions to take their business to the next level.
Joel Montvelisky is a Co-Founder and Chief Solution Architect at PractiTest. Joel has been in testing and QA since 1997, working as a tester, QA Manager and Director, and Consultant for companies in Israel, the US, and the EU. Joel is a Forbes council member, and a blogger and is constantly imparting webinars on a number of testing and Quality Related topics. In addition, Joel is the founder and Chair of the OnlineTestConf, the co-founder of the State of Testing survey and report, and a Director at the Association of Software Testing.
Visionary and goal-oriented IT Test Architect (QA Process and Tools) with demonstrated experience in Implementation of Test Tools enterprise wide for adoption including training Global SAP FSRI implementation Test Manager. Currently responsible for managing the Test Process to align with NYL SDLC and Test Tools for Test Management, Automation and Performance Testing.
Shilpa heads QA for managed services engineering and technology practice in KPMG US. She has led quality assurance for Industry verticals like Financial Services, Telecom, cyber, Grant Management etc focusing on quality solutions that scale globally. She leads a global team of relentless quality engineers specialized in functional, accessibility, performance, automation and security testing. She has extensive experience of building and mentoring Global QA teams and processes from the ground up, defining automation frameworks, tool selections, ROI, Test Automation for Agile and DevOps.
Anupama heads Quality Engineering for Structured Finance & US Public Finance within S&P Global Ratings Technology division, she has over 17 years of experience in the Banking and Financial services domain in the areas of Quality Engineering, Strategy Development, Program Management, Business Development, and Customer relationship management. In her current role, she oversees Quality Engineering for a complex portfolio of Analytical applications leading and managing a global team, overseeing related functions including Product QA strategy, automation, performance, and resourcing, supporting implementation of platform buildout solutions consolidating legacy applications, productizing and generating newer revenue streams. In her prior roles within Quality Engineering Capital Markets, she helped build digital capabilities focused on user experience, business and technology assurance, defined enterprise target operating models to deliver quality at speed and implemented large scale QA to full stack workforce transformation programs.
Vidya is a Head of Engineering at Xero and leads engineering teams in the US, UK and Canada. Prior to Xero, she worked with Big 4 consulting firms EY, PwC, KPMG, CapGemini as well as financial firms like Bank of America (Merrill lynch) & Citibank. She has around 18+ years of experience in software development and held roles ranging from software engineer to solution architect to engineering leader. She studied electronics engineering at the Mumbai University, India and General management program at Harvard Business school. Vidya has been acting as a diversity ambassador for women in tech at Xero and diversity and empowerment is a key focus of her engineering leadership.
Tony is an accomplished financial services leader with over 30 years of experience in delivering complex global solutions by driving innovation, process optimization, and technology adoption to advance customer experience and revenue growth while optimizing expenses. One of Tony's achievements has been to co-develop Verizon's successful Voice Identity and Fraud solution. Prior to joining Verizon, Tony worked at Citi for 15 years, where he led a global workforce of 300 professional services experts who delivered customer experience and contact center solutions across several lines of business, including retail banking, credit cards, mortgages, collections, telemarketing, and fraud.
With over 20 years of experience in the fintech software industry, Chris Labarbera plays a critical role in driving strategy and execution for the company's top clients. As Senior Innovation Principal at Verizon, he is an expert in modernizing legacy applications and infrastructure through leveraging cloud computing and automation, and he is also responsible for consulting on Verizon's advanced communications product offerings. Many of Chris’ achievements include both business facing and technical engineering roles with tasks including the building of a consolidated server, network, and security monitoring and performance tuning infrastructure for a global 100 financial services firm.
Speaker: Stephen Ramey, VP Cyber Risk Engineering, Sompo International Stephen will review how Sompo has evolved its cyber risk insurance products in the wake of the President's 2021 executive order on cybersecurity, recent high-profile vulnerabilities including Log4j and the Microsoft Exchange Zero Day vulnerabilities, and how financial firms can best embed security into their DevOps platforms and processes. These major cybersecurity events generate countless data points that can be aggregated, analyzed, and interpreted to assess the maturity of cybersecurity practices within an organization or as an industry whole. Structuring the information is critical to the successful detection of trends and improvement of cybersecurity practices.
Speaker: Anupama Malladi, Head of Quality Engineering, Structured Finance and US public finance, S&P Global Ratings S&P Global Ratings, a globally respected credit ratings agency, providing a range of products and services for investors, issuers, intermediaries, and beyond to make decisions with conviction, has re-focused its software engineering practices around business value delivery and improved end user experience. Anupama will explain how adoption of a customer-centric approach has impacted on the organization of Quality Engineering, helping deliver measurable business outcomes. A particular focus on how S&P Global Ratings has changed its benchmarking for Test Coverage and its measures of success. She will also take a deep dive into the approach of determining the Quality Sentiment map for end-to-end business processes, making smarter automation investments, and how complex test data management is organized to support a global business.
Speaker: Vidya More, Head of Engineering, Xero In this session Vidya will demonstrate how Extreme programming and Generative AI can be used to generate AI-aided test cases to move to the next level of Agile. She will also explain how DevSecOps and compliance requirements can be embedded in this new framework, and will discuss some of the challenges - and potential solutions - in testing with the help of GPT-4 and other AI applications. Xero is a leading Cloud-based accounting software provider to smaller businesses and Vidya is leading engineering teams building tax products for the USA, Canada and EMEA. Xero has been Cloud-based since its launch in 2006 and has been focused on creating sustainable engineering excellence, and Vidya has been an evangelist for new engineering methodologies at Xero as well as at her previous consulting role at EY. Vidya is currently exploring how to leverage extreme programming and generative AI to accelerate product development and fully embed QA testing as an integrated part of the engineering process.
Speaker: Sandesh Gawande, CTO, iCEDQ Recent history has taught us that major data migration programs following banking mergers can be hugely challenging and problematic. In this session Sandesh Gawande, will take us through a detailed case study involving a major investment bank which had acquired a brokerage firm. Following the merger, the bank decided to maintain an independent order management system, but merge the trading and settlement systems into a single platform. Sandesh will explain how iCEDQ's automated test creation platform - helped certify the data migration. The need to run both settlement systems in parallel during the migration was one key challenge. A tight timeline was another. And Sandesh will demonstrate how the migration was accomplished in record time, with minimum resources and in compliance with regulatory requirements.
Speaker: Aaron Jensen, Senior Manager Solution Engineering & DevOps Advisor, Delphix Aaron will discuss how you can strike the balance between DevOps Enablement and security to securely fuel cloud pipelines with the best possible (production realistic) test data to maximize application development value. He will also discuss how organizations are extending data governance to enable automated / secure delivery of appropriate data across hybrid (cloud/on-prem) environments. Finally he will share some ways the leading companies are enabling ephemeral data to both reduce costs and reduce the environmental impact of IT operations.
