Recap: QA Financial Forum in New York 2021

October 25th, 2021 by Adam Sandman

Inflectra was excited to sponsor The QA Financial Forum New York 2021 - an in-person conference that took place on Oct 19, 2021, in beautiful New York City. The event was packed with talks on enterprise software quality, app security and DevSecOps, continuous integration, and so much more at the Harvard Club. Learn more about what is new in the worlds of Quality Assurance, Risk Management, and Financial Services....

Travel to New York City

Making a nice change from the usual world of either online conferences using Zoom or in-person events where we have to take a flight from the airport, we were lucky that our trip from our headquarters in Washington, DC to New York allowed us to experience the joys of train travel, in this case, the super-cool Acela from Amtrak. After a short three-hour journey, we made our way from Union Station to....

... The recently renovated Pennsylvania Station in New York. Occupying the Old Post Office building, the new "Moynihan Train Hall" was an unexpected delight after the bad old days of scuttling into New York like rats in a tunnel. Now we could enter through its majestic atrium and be right on 8th Avenue next to Madison Square Garden.

The QA Financial Forum New York 2021

The QA Financial Forum, now in its sixth year, is produced by QA Media, an independent information and research business which is focused on the management of software quality assurance at financial firms. The Forum features expert speakers from leading banks, insurance companies, exchanges, and asset managers discussing key opportunities and challenges.

After an absence of over 18 months, The QA Financial Forum New York returned as a live event on October 19th, 2021 at The Harvard Club on W44th Street.

This year, the Forum key topics included:

Managing enterprise software quality in the DevOps transition
Accelerating continuous integration and delivery with automation
Technologies for automation and AI
App security and DevSecOps
Emerging standards for software risk management and operational resilience

The Inflectra team comprising: Adam, Thea, Teresa, and Sriram were on hand to discuss matters regarding risk management, software development, quality assurance, agile transformation, cybersecurity, and DevOps.

The team were excited to meet QA experts and leaders in financial services in-person for the first time since the pandemic started in 2020. For many of the attendees, the event was also their first in-person experience since 2020.

Demonstrating the ease of use, power and flexibility of the Inflectra SpiraPlan platform, the Inflectra booth features interactive exhibits including high resolution iPads showcasing the live SpiraPlan platform running in the cloud and accessible on any device.

The attendees remarked on the refinement, user-friendliness, and compelling displays of business intelligence that could be accessed with a simple drill down from the main dashboards.

Meeting Key Speakers

In addition to meeting and networking with attendees, Team Inflectra was pleased to be able to invite to New York (and QA Financial) the world-renowned Dr. Oonagh McDonald CBE, who has worked for the London Metal Exchange, International Monetary Fund, and UK Financial Services Authority. In 1998, she was awarded the CBE for services to financial regulation and business. She has been the Chair of the Fairbanking Mark Assessment Panel for the Fairbanking Foundation since November 2013.

In the photograph above, you can see Dr. McDonald along with the Inflectra Team.

The Inflectra team would like to thank the conference organizer - Matthew Crabbe from QA Financial for putting on the event, moderating the sessions, and making sure that everything went according to plan.

We'd also like to give a shout-out to Dr. Sriram Rajagopalan, the resident Agile Evangelist at Inflectra who was able to provide many important insights to the attendees on the subjects of risk management and employing a common-sense approach to agile development.

New frontiers in systems and supervision: Modernization at government agencies, and the response to new compliance standards for software risk management

Adam Sandman, Founder, and CEO of Inflectra was invited to be part of the panel discussing Risk Management and Operational Resilience. The panelists discussed how government agencies and central banks are leveraging DevOps technologies to manage their own digital transformations. At a time when banking supervisors around the world are increasing their scrutiny of operational resilience standards among retail and commercial banks, the panel was looking at how central banks are assessing their own needs for new tools and technologies and how their experience is shaping their views on software risk management and supervisory technologies.

Focus topics included the opportunities for applying machine learning to the automation of supervision and the "pressure points" in the modernization of platforms, notably payments.

The speakers included:
• Dr. Oonagh McDonald, senior advisor, Crito Capital, formerly arbitrator to FINRA and former director of the UK Financial Services Authority
• Jan Guido, business resiliency consultant
• Aaron Bartnick, senior associate, Macro Advisory Partners
• Nita Kohli, head of operational resilience, Freddie Mac
• Adam Sandman, founder and CEO, Inflectra

Heading Out on the Town to Celebrate!

After the conclusion of the day's activities, the #TeamInflectra decided to head out to Times Square to celebrate the return to in-person events and the chance to meet and discuss technical and strategic topics with speakers and attendees in real life!