CaixaBank S.A., a Spanish financial services firm based in Valencia and Barcelona in Spain, is moving forward with its experimental application of quantum computing to its financial products and services.
CaixaBank, the third-largest lender by market cap in Spain (after Banco Santander and the BBVA), confirmed that it’s working on a machine learning algorithm that will classify its customers based on their overall credit risk.
Last year, the Spanish bank reported on its ongoing tests of tech giant IBM’s Framework Opensource Qiskit, which is being used to implement a quantum computing algorithm that will assess the financial risks involved with a mortgage portfolio and treasury bills portfolio. These have been created for this particular initiative and use real financial data.
CaixaBank, which has around 5,400 branches and claims 15.8 million customers, said that for its recent trials, the institution had been using a hybrid computing framework, which leverages both quantum computing and conventional (binary) computing in the different stages of the calculation process that’s used to classify customers’ credit risk profiles.
CaixaBank’s software does this by using a public data set that corresponds to 1,000 “artificial” customers, who have a profile that’s similar to actual clients, however, with information adjusted specifically for these tests.
CaixaBank, which is listed on the Bolsa de Madrid and is part of the IBEX 35 stock market index, said that the complete results have not yet been released.
The financial services company’s initial investigation confirmed that the application of hybrid algorithms (quantum and conventional) to risk analysis calculations can arrive at similar conclusions or results as the regular (binary) method in significantly less time
The bank noted:
“For CaixaBank, it is essential to invest in exploring the potential of quantum computing for various areas of the financial sector, although the first commercial applications may take a while.”