HSBC’s ‘quantum’ leap: Bank beats rivals with world-first trading tech

HSBC Holdings Plc said it’s achieved a world-first breakthrough in deploying quantum computing in financial markets, as a race intensifies among some of Wall Street's biggest firms to embed the cutting-edge technology in their daily operations.

- HARRY WILSON

The bank said Thursday that it used International Business Machines Corp’s most-advanced Heron quantum processor to attain a 34 percent improvement in predicting how likely a bond will trade at a given price. HSBC and the US technology giant applied quantum processing to an anonymised set of European bond trading data and found it could significantly enhance the efficiency of the market.

That marks a meaningful leap as this is the first time any bank has used real trades at scale to demonstrate the edge offered by the emerging technology, which to date has largely been the preserve of academic research and specialist tech firms. It is the next frontier companies ranging from Alphabet Inc to IBM and Microsoft Corp are seeking to conquer by plowing billions of dollars, though the road to practical applications appears to be long.