Forget what Goldman Sachs said about useful quantum computing being five years away in finance. Banks can already get a 100-fold advantage by using quantum computers to solve problems such as portfolio optimisation and fraud detection fraud, says Spanish startup Multiverse Computing.
The company, which raised a €10m seed funding round today, has developed a quantum software product that it is supplying to customers including BBVA, Bankia the European Tax Agency and the Bank of Canada.
“It depends on the problem you are trying to solve,” says Enrique Lizaso, chief executive. “For some problems like optimising investment portfolios and machine learning to detect banking fraud, quantum computers can already outperform classical computers today.”
Tasks like these can be done 100 times faster using quantum rather than classical computers, even though today’s quantum computers are still relatively limited, with less than 100 qubits and high error rates.
Goldman Sachs — which has been working with quantum startup QCWare to test out practical applications has estimated that it would take machines with 7500 qubits and five more years— for quantum computing to be of practical use to the financial services industry. Jeremy O’Brien, CEO of photonic quantum computing company PsiQuantum, says quantum computers must reach 1m qubits — something he believes is a decade away— to be useful.
However, by focusing on problems that are particularly well suited to quantum computers, Multiverse says it is possible to get quantum advantage even with today’s small, error-prone machines.
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