HSBC $HSBA (-0,78 %) was the first bank in the world to use a quantum computer in the financial market - a breakthrough that is likely to accelerate the race for technology.
With the most powerful quantum processor to date, Heron from IBM $IBM (-4,51 %) the major British bank has improved the prediction of the price at which a bond will be traded by 34 percent.
The basis for this was an anonymized data set of European bond deals, as the bank announced on Thursday (25.9.). This could significantly increase the efficiency of the market.
The experiment is considered a milestone because real transactions were included on a large scale for the first time. Until now, the technology was mainly limited to universities and specialized tech companies.
Companies such as Google's parent company Alphabet $GOOGL (-3,4 %)IBM and Microsoft $MSFT (-3,3 %) are already investing billions of dollars in quantum research, but the road to everyday applications remains long.
》No live trade《
HSBC's attempt was aimed at over-the-counter trading, in which transactions are carried out directly between two parties - without an exchange or broker. Philip Intallura, Head of Quantum Technology at HSBC, emphasizes that although it was not a live trade, it was very much a demonstration on a real production scale. "We firmly believe that we are on the cusp of a new era of computer technology in financial services - and not just in the distant future," says Intallura.
While technology companies are setting the pace in terms of development, banks such as JP Morgan Chase $JPM (-2,22 %)Goldman Sachs $GS (-2,43 %)Citigroup $C (-3,2 %) and HSBC are also investing heavily in quantum projects.
Management consultancies McKinsey and KPMG expect far-reaching benefits: better risk management, optimized portfolios, more accurate predictions of asset prices and sharper fraud detection.
》Faster with physics《
The foundation of quantum computers is physics itself. Unlike conventional computers, they do not work step by step, but in parallel. This allows extremely complex problems to be solved very quickly.
Alphabet showed just how big the leap is at the end of last year: the quantum processor Willow solved a problem in five minutes that even the most powerful supercomputers since the beginning of the universe would have calculated - and not come up with the result.
