Our agenda features speakers from leading banks, insurance companies and asset managers as well as exchanges and payments platforms.
The QA Financial Forum London has become established as the leading conference for software quality assurance and IT risk management professionals. Our agenda features speakers from leading banks, insurance companies and asset managers as well as exchanges and payments platforms. Presentations are made and discussed under the Chatham House Rule, with the objective of sharing firms’ experience of IT change management.Click below to see the highlights from the 2018 QA Financial Forum
Bio coming soon.
Michael joined Wells Fargo in July 2021 and is currently the Head of Testing Enablement for the Bank. Reporting to the Global Head of Chief Technology Office Enterprise Application Services, Michael’s organization partners across Technology to ensure its Testing Products and Services will support the engineering community to release quality software through agile delivery across Wells Fargo’s suite of applications, while reducing the Cost of Quality through Automation, Performance Engineering and Continuous Testing. Michael is a Seasoned IT leader in the Financial Services industry with over 35+ years’ experience successfully leading and transforming global Development and QA/QE teams. He is an exceptional people manager with a track record of motivating, mentoring and leading large, globally diverse teams through times of extensive change. Michael is a career-long champion of diversity with a passion for driving an inclusive workforce and an advocate for human capital. He currently holds the lead role for Inclusion as part of the LQBTQ+ Segment of Wells Fargo’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Initiative, helping to promote inclusive environments in which all employees are heard and differences are celebrated and respected. Prior to joining Wells Fargo, Michael was employed by Refinitiv’s Division of London Stock Exchange Group, where he was the Head of Product Engineering Test Delivery. Reporting directly to the Head of Quality Engineering for Refinitiv, this role played an integral part in ensuring the Firm’s Quality Position and Production Stability.
Melinda has over 25 years’ experience in technology change, with 17 years specialising in software testing and quality assurance within the finance domain. Melinda is a highly motivated individual who is passionate about the evolution of software testing in today’s Agile environment. Melinda has extensive experience in managing and delivering large scale testing programmes, and has worked across UK, Europe, AsiaPac – bringing a global perspective to change programmes. In her current position as Head of Global Quality Assurance at Schroders Investment Management, Melinda has played a key role in the adoption and implementation of Agile across Global Technology and the wider organisation. A key part of that transformation was ensuring that test services evolved with the development teams; transitioning from a provider of people to a Quality Assurance Practice that supports Agile and DevOps principles.
Jim Tomaney has 30 years of experience building, delivering, marketing and selling enterprise payments solutions and associated services for the transaction processing industry across the world. He has worked in a variety of senior roles delivering solutions for organisations including Barclays, ING, CIBC, Bank Of America, ABN AMRO & Vocalink. Following a career with ACI Worldwide, Wincor Nixdorf, Level Four Software and Barclays Bank, Jim ran his own consulting business, Q-ATM Ltd, for 7 years. Q-ATM clients included technology providers, banks, sourcing companies and transaction processors. In 2017, Q-ATM was acquired by RenovITe Technologies Inc.
Kaushik Chaubal is an engineering lead for Aladdin Data Cloud - to deliver a next-generation solution for the investment management industry by bringing Aladdin and non-Aladdin data together making it easy for users to build on top of it with Aladdin Studio, BlackRock’s platform for developers.
Richa is a Director for the Testing practice at Infosys. She has over 18 years of industry experience in strategic consulting, program management, and testing. In addition, she has cross-functional experience across delivery, sales, strategy, and operations.Over the last decade, she has helped several customers transform their testing organisations to achieve their strategic imperatives and position QA at the centre of organisational change management. She has extensive experience working with several banking, financial services, and insurance customers across the globe.
Sudeep is a senior leader with top tier investment banking and financial services experience managing testing globally for enterprise-wide change programmes & digital transformations. Currently, he is leading the QA and Testing division for London Stock Exchange Group focused on building high performing multi-disciplinary teams & delivering testing for complex technology-driven business and technology transformations & regulatory programmes. Sudeep is an evangelist who loves solving organisational challenges with thought leadership & strategies and apply DevOps techniques for testing whilst implementing an ‘automation first’ approach.
Vishal Bhatnagar is Country Managing Director for the UK & Ireland at CAST, the global leader in software analytics and risk prevention. Given CAST’s unique product positioning, Vishal works with FTSE 100 companies, leading IT services and consulting firms on how to reduce software risks, improve vendor governance and transparency, whilst increasing IT agility at optimal costs. Prior to joining CAST, Vishal was working on the IT supplier side for almost a decade, negotiating large IT vendor contracts and SLAs in outsourced IT transformation programs. Vishal holds a B. Engg. Degree in Electronics from Pune University, India and an Executive MBA from London Business School
Jigisha Lock is a seasoned project manager with more than 12 years of industry experience across Private Banking, Risk Management, and Compliance in New York, Zurich, and London. Her expertise spans across Trading, Front and Middle Office processes and Risk Management within Credit Suisse. A subject matter expert in trade, e-communication and financial crime surveillance, Jigisha successfully leads distributed technology teams across Singapore, London, New York, Zurich, and Wroclaw to deliver key Compliance initiatives covering more than 30 jurisdictions globally, which mitigates risk and also addresses global and local regulatory mandates.
Mihai is a software engineer and has been practicing Agile for over 10 years across finance, telecom and b2b industries. He is an advocate for quality driven development, with continuous delivery as core practice. Mihai has a BSc in Data Communications and has studied Project Management at Open University Business School. He is now working for UBS as Test Manager for the Global Equity Derivatives group. With UBS, he has been involved in the Equity Derivatives group Agile transformation and the delivery of major regulatory reporting projects, such as MIFID II and the US Internal Revenue Code section 871(m). He is also leading the group’s DevOps team, tasked to build the continuous delivery process through test automation, environment virtualisation and automated deployment.
Iain McCowatt is a software tester whose expertise and passion for testing spans multiple industries and more than a decade: he had his first exposure to testing in the late 90s, and by 2002 decided to focus on it full time. During this time, he has been a hands-on tester, test manager and occasional automator. He specialises in getting stuff done in difficult environments, and in helping organisations solve complex testing problems on large enterprise IT projects.
Shashi Kiran is the CMO at Quali, based out of the Silicon Valley, USA. He has been with hi-tech companies in various technology and leadership positions for over two decades, building and scaling market outreaches for startups to multi-billion dollar businesses. He can be reached at www.linkedin.com/in/skiran
Iosif is co-founder and co-CEO of Exactpro, a specialist firm focused on functional and non-functional testing for market infrastructures. Founded in 2009 with ten core specialists on board, Exactpro now employs over 550 specialists. In May 2015 - January 2018, Exactpro was part of the Technology Services division of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). In January 2018, the founders of Exactpro completed a management buyout from LSEG. Iosif manages business development and research in the field of high-load trading systems reliability. He is actively involved in delivering strategic software testing initiatives. Iosif has organized several industry conferences, including EXTENT - Software Testing and Trading Technology Trends Conference. He frequently speaks at worldwide FinTech events. Iosif started his professional career in 2000 as a software engineer in a US-based software development company. For seven years, he worked as a Team Lead and a Technology Architect on projects for a number of US companies. In 2006, Iosif joined a company providing QA services in the financial sector. His extensive software development experience helped him to establish a Performance Testing Department specialising in testing high load trading systems. As a Technical Lead, Iosif was responsible for developing testing tools and implementing technical solutions for a number of leading exchanges and global investment banks. Iosif also has experience managing a consulting practice with a focus on advanced execution systems. As VP of Technology, he was responsible for implementing testing solutions on a number of complex projects for customers worldwide.
With more than 14 Years of Investment Banking and Market Data Services IT experience, Avtar started his career working for Morgan Stanley in its Securities Lending IT team based in London. After nearly three years, he moved to Goldman Sachs Asset Management, where he had a variety of roles spanning almost 10 years, the latest of which was as an Executive Director for the GSAM Fixed Income Technology team. In the summer of 2016, Avtar joined Morningstar Real-Time Data as the Head of Development and QA. He is currently managing a team of 34 engineers spread across the London, Bristol, Chicago and China office, focussing on ingestion and delivery of Real-Time Market Data.
Bio coming soon
Jean Paul is a driven, curious and passionate IT professional with 23 years of experience. He moved from developer and system engineer to a management position to combine technical expertise with the ability to motivate and coach people. He is responsible for setting up the Center of Expertise Software Development, the internal software development knowledge center of ABN AMRO. ABN AMRO’s goal is to set standards on software quality and speed of delivery to make it more efficient, therefore enabling the business to deliver more functionality faster.
Paul has worked in various positions in IT for over 15 years. Much of this time has been dedicated to software quality and Agile delivery. These days, Paul leads a talented team of DevOps specialists through an exciting and proactively disruptive journey, driving Hiscox towards better IT.
Chandan is Head of Testing and Quality Assurance for Human Resources Information Technology Department at HSBC. He is accountable for driving test strategy and digital agile transformation for all major programs & change releases across production estate. He has significant experience in the global delivery across Banking & Financial Services, the majority in leadership, management and team building capabilities. He has set up and driven Agile Testing Centre of Excellence (ATCOE). Chandan has been conferred with Executive Masters in Business Administration from London Business School specialising in Corporate Strategy, Finance and Orgnizational Behaviour. He was also awarded Bachelors in Electronics Engineering from VJTI, University of Mumbai with First Class.
Bio coming soon.
Denise studied biochemistry and began studying for her doctorate in this area. She later completed additional studies in economics and informatics and worked as a project manager for more than 10 years within financial services. 8 years ago Denise changed her career path to focus on Quality Assurance. She built up the Competence Centre Testing Department at Julius Baer in Zurich. Today she leads this department with a primary focus on Test Environment Management and Test Automation, as well as being the owner of Testing Processes within the bank. In this role, Denise continues to pursue and realise her vision of test optimisation and continuous process improvement, adapting to the latest technologies, strategies, tools and methodologies.
Fabian is a senior technologist with more than nine years of experience in technology. He has worked as project manager, business analyst, application manager and software developer. In the past he has built applications such as online banking solutions, as well as research and trading systems for banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and United Kingdom. Fabian is a hands-on technologist who enjoys working in a DevOps environment following Agile principles. He cares about clean code and continuous delivery of quality software.
In recent years, Deutsche Bank has placed increasing emphasis on growing its digital ecosystem. Michael will detail how Deutsche Bank is managing IT risk through process standardization and efficient governance. He will talk about Deutsche Bank’s QA and Testing transformation journey, with a focus on regulatory compliance.
A case study in managing change. Over the past three years, Schroders has completed what is arguably the most far-reaching Agile transformation of any financial firm. Based in Singapore, Melinda is global lead of quality assurance at Schroders, one of the world’s largest asset managers. In this keynote presentation she will detail the changes that Schroders has made in its testing process, and the critical role of DevOps in software quality assurance.
Financial firms can extract the maximum leverage from automation by applying it to legacy systems. This presentation will focus on how this works for core banking systems, and for payment platforms. As far back as the 1980s, Jim worked on one of the first commercial-off-the-shelf payment platforms – one which is still deployed around the world, processing billions of transactions each month. Working with platforms such as this, Jim realised that increased processing hours and contracting release cycles were creating unsustainable pressure on the testing of legacy systems. But there is way to de-risk legacy platform change.
In the transformation to Agile, investment banks face the challenge of how they best embed regulatory compliance in the software development lifecycle, and how they identify those apps that prudential regulators consider critical to the firm and to the financial system. The challenge is heightened in the case of derivatives dealing. Using MIFID II as a case study, Mihai will take you through UBS’s journey from Waterfall to Agile in equity derivatives trading, including the use of automation technologies and the challenges surrounding off-shoring and test data provisioning.
Digitisation has spurred the need for speed and given birth to the adoption of DevOps and cloud-based operational models.. Application modernisation initiatives are being fuelled by digitisation and are driving some of the biggest architectural changes in the IT landscape today. While moving from 3-tier architectures to cloud-native and micro-services architectures can cause major shifts in security postures and compliance requirements, we’ve observed even minor software patch updates and version changes are no less risky. How can you make infrastructure or software updates less risky while staying compliant to financial services regulations, all while having a foot on the accelerator? Join Shashi to learn how the concept of cloud sandboxes and environments-as-a-service can help strike the right balance between speed and quality, all the while evolving your quality assurance practices to accommodate Cloud and DevOps. The session will share examples of Fortune 500 FiServ customer case studies.
The Banking Reform Act (Ring Fencing) has made it necessary for Barclays to create a new UK legal entity, complete with a Treasury function with the trading capability to both fund the business and manage risk. This required work across more than one hundred IT systems and multiple business units. But how to test such a thing when faced with a plethora of disparate test environments and a high degree of configuration? In production. Carefully. Join Iain as he explores the challenges inherent in testing in a production environment, the controls necessary to safely do so, and lessons learned that will be applied to the standup of the next entity: the Brexit bank.
J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s trading platform transacts around $1 trillion annually. Fabian will explain how the firm addresses the challenge of creating high-performance, event-driven systems that make decisions in real-time using non-trivial algorithms. He will look at an application design that helps to separate different parts of decision-making logic into maintainable units, avoid data race conditions and allow for data replay for debugging or state recovery. Also: how to test such systems and how to cover some practical problems that arise when a large number of events pass through the system. We will also see how this pattern is applied in real trading application with some real code examples.
