Leading researchers say that quantum computers will eventually be powerful enough to crack current encryption methods, making all kinds of sensitive company and personal data vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches.
Though they disagreed on how far away that reality might be, finance and quantum experts at the Canada FinTech Forum in Montréal were firm that the financial industry should already be preparing for a quantum future, even if a fault-tolerant quantum computer is not yet available.
“If you’re not starting to get ready now, you’re going to pay a big price in five to 10 years.”
“We have now to prepare, because when it’ll be what we call ‘Q-Day’…it will be too late and your secret will be [out],” said Mark Kaven Lamothe Lafrenière, the director of information security and cyberdefence at the Autorité des marchés financiers, Québec’s securities regulator.
Quantum computing companies around the world are competing to build machines that can solve useful problems faster than classic computers. Unlike the binary bits in classical computing, the basic units of quantum computing, qubits, can exist in two states at once, allowing for alternative, and in some cases accelerated, approaches to problem solving.
It might seem out-of-place for quantum to be a point of discussion at a FinTech conference, but the prospect of a wide-scale cybersecurity breach has made the technology impossible to ignore, panellists said. Financial firms that don’t consider quantum technology in their business plans today will likely pay for it down the line.
“If you’re not starting to get ready now, you’re going to pay a big price in five to 10 years,” PSP Investments’ David Ouellet said. “From a cash-flow perspective, you’d better invest now instead of investing then.”
Some banks in Canada are already starting to explore how they might future-proof themselves against quantum computers’ capabilities, and benefit from them. Bank of Montreal, for example, launched an internal institute for applied AI and quantum, as well as partnerships with Quantum Industry Canada and the Chicago Quantum Exchange, in April.
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Louise Davey, founder of quantum readiness consultancy LDIQ, compared the eventual availability of quantum computers to a “ChatGPT moment,” earning uncomfortable laughter from the audience when she asked how long it took their organizations to adapt to the release of OpenAI’s AI chatbot.
Similarly to AI, panellists said businesses should also be plotting how they’ll use quantum computing to solve problems they couldn’t before.
Madhavi Mantha, chief of strategy and partnerships at PINQ2, a Québec non-profit that consults on quantum technology, said quantum computers will be helpful to financial institutions for “anything optimization-related,” including simulations, scenario planning, and pricing.
“These are all computationally intensive problems that exist in financial institutions today, and those are the places where you start,” Mantha said.
Feature image courtesy Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit.