Truist Financial is getting ready for quantum computing through a new partnership with IBM.
The Charlotte-based bank announced Wednesday that it will join the IBM Quantum Accelerator program and welcome IBM to the bank's Innovator in Residence program.
Truist aims to get quantum-safe ready in the area of
"Offensively, we want to make sure that we're putting together policies, standards and controls, that we're able to proactively put things in place, not only for new workloads with quantum computing capabilities, but existing workloads that are sitting on more traditional infrastructure, or even cloud-based infrastructure," said Ken Meyer, divisional chief information and experience officer at Truist, in an interview. "On the defensive side, it's making sure that we're putting up the type of cyber related controls and encryption standards and other things that'll help us protect from malicious actors."
Truist declined to share how much money or how many people it is dedicating to this effort. It did say it has assembled a team of employees including application developers, infrastructure engineers, line of business leaders, cyber engineers, network engineers and experts in risk and auditing who will work on quantum capabilities.
Other banks, including
"We realize that if a company doesn't do anything about the market right now, and just waits for quantum advantage to become a reality, when quantum advantage becomes real, it might be too late," said Marco Pistoia, managing director, distinguished engineer, head of global technology applied research and head of quantum computing at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview last fall. "We want to be ready when quantum advantage becomes possible on a higher level."
These banks are using cloud-based quantum-computing-as-a-service from companies like D-Wave, IBM, Google, Amazon, Rigetti, Microsoft and QC Ware. They're testing the technology for complex problems like derivatives pricing, portfolio optimization and index tracking.
Industry experts agree this effort is worthwhile, especially on the cybersecurity side.
"Banks should be educating themselves on the coming quantum computing evolution now, with a specific focus on getting their cybersecurity house in order to be ready to deploy post-quantum encryption in the next few years," said Sultan Meghji, a professor at Duke University's Pratt Engineering School, former chief innovation officer at the FDIC and CEO and cofounder of Frontier Foundry.
For most banks, except the largest 20 or so, the lowest-risk path forward on quantum resilience is to move to native cloud platforms from the big tech vendors that have already been working on this for a few years, he said, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Not quite ready for prime time
Quantum computing uses quantum mechanics, the laws of physics that govern the smallest particles in the universe, to solve problems at high speeds. Traditional computers only allow bits of information to live in one state (as a 0 or 1) at a time. A quantum computer uses qubits (quantum bits) that enable bits of information to have a value of 1, 0 or both 0 and 1 simultaneously. This means a quantum computer can manipulate and assess many combinations of information.
A quantum computer can cycle through 10 to the 154th power potential answers to a problem in microseconds.
But the technology still has challenges to overcome. Manufacturers are still trying to scale the number of qubits in a quantum computer while achieving a sufficient level of qubit quality by working on error mitigation and fault tolerance. Some manufacturers have said they plan to have fault-tolerant quantum-computing hardware by 2030.
IBM is working on error mitigation to correct for the instabilities of quantum computing. This work was featured in the
"There's noise in today's quantum devices and error mitigation is a newer technique that can be used today to correct for some of those errors with the type of devices that we have today," said Noelle Ibrahim, associate partner, quantum computing, banking and financial markets at IBM Quantum, in an interview.
Error mitigation will help certain use cases come to fruition a bit earlier, she said.
"In terms of what that means for banking, we're really at the precipice of a new, exciting era because error mitigation can be used for many use cases that have already been published, for example, on simulators," Ibrahim said. "The next step is to actually try those use cases on real devices with error mitigation and to start working with them. We're working with partners like Truist to bring that cutting edge to commercial fruition. We're not exactly there yet, but we think that the time when some exciting new developments will come in the banking industry is pretty soon."
Once the technology itself is ready, the models meant to run on it will have to be rewritten in a quantum-friendly way.
Once all this is done, potential use cases will include options pricing, AI and quantum machine learning applications, according to Ibrahim.
But the most important use case for banks is most likely cybersecurity, making sure a bank and its third parties are safe from attackers armed with quantum computers.
"There's a weakest link element to it whereby if you have a supplier or a vendor that is not quantum safe, that could disrupt your own efforts to be quantum safe as well," Ibrahim said.
This makes standards and industry consortia efforts important, she said.
Inside the Truist-IBM alliance
In the IBM Accelerator program, Truist's technologists will be able to learn from other IBM clients that have been testing use cases.
"We think there's potential in a number of different areas," Meyer said. "When you think about the world of trading, as an example, that's an area that could be really fascinating when you think of the speed in which you have to conduct potential trades. And then to be able to do that over a quantum computing network, that could be something that's really interesting. Payments are also really interesting to us in the future."
Core banking and real-time settlement could potentially run on quantum computers in the future, he hypothesized.
"We're going to explore a lot of different areas to determine what makes the most sense," he said. "But this world is changing pretty rapidly. So we're going to continue to keep our finger on the pulse of what's going on from a pure capability perspective."
Quantum computing could also be used for AI applications such as document summarization – JPMorgan Chase technologists recently published a
Though quantum computing is not quite ready, banks are testing it for portfolio optimization, index tracking, options pricing and other tough mathematical problems.
Truist's Innovator in Residence program brings in outside subject matter experts to help the bank innovate. IBM is the newest member; Amazon Web Services and Verizon are existing partners.
"What we're doing with IBM goes way beyond just quantum," Meyer said. "As part of the Innovator in Residence program, they have distinguished engineers that ultimately take up residence in our facility, working on co-creating on real-life use cases."
Truist is already working with IBM on some generative AI internal use cases right now, some using Watson X, Meyer said. Watson X is a new AI and data platform from IBM that is intended to help companies use generative AI and machine learning.
"We're looking at actually getting things to production," Meyer said. "What are the things that we can co-create, build proofs of concept for, and ultimately get into the production environment and into the hands of our teammates or our clients?"
Meyer would like to have quantum safe standards, controls, frameworks and architectures in place over the next year or so, then start to deploy them.
"As we develop new use cases for potential quantum computing, it'd be great to be able to start actually running real, live workloads," Meyer said. "But we're going to crawl before we walk. Crawling is getting safe and making sure that we're doing it the right way."
