Quantum Computing and Quantum Communications in the Financial Industry

Finance has been identified as the first industry sector to benefit from quantum computing, due to its abundance of use cases with exponential complexity and the fact that, in finance, time is of the essence, which makes the case for solutions to be computed with high accuracy in real time.  Typical use cases in finance that lend themselves to quantum computing are portfolio optimization, derivative pricing, risk analysis, and several problems in the realm of machine learning, such as fraud detection and extractive text summarization.

 

This talk describes the state of the art of quantum computing for finance, focusing on the research work conducted by the quantum computing team at JPMorgan Chase in the area of quantum algorithms and applications for finance.  It is also well known that quantum computing has the potential to break public-key cryptography.  A quantum-enabled attacker with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will have the ability to factor large numbers into prime factors in a short amount of time, and consequently compute anyone’s private key from the corresponding public key, decrypt confidential data, and impersonate other entities.  Numerous cryptographer worldwide have been working on new, Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms, but there is no mathematical proof that these algorithms are resistant to quantum computing attacks.  This presentation will also describe JPMorgan Chase’s research effort consisting of coupling PQC with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), which is mathematically proven to be unconditionally secure.