A team of researchers from Barclays’ chief technology and innovation office, in collaboration with IBM, have published a paper describing a proof-of-concept quantum optimised application.
The paper, Quantum algorithms for mixed binary optimization, published earlier in October, discussed an algorithm the team had applied to transaction settlement for ensuring the integrity of trades in securities.
The paper described the problem of transaction settlement as one that is difficult to optimise. This is because it requires a combination of both the legal constraints that must be satisfied when settling delivery-versus-payment transactions and the additional optionality introduced by what the authors describe as “collateralizing assets and utilising credit facilities”. The researchers described how a system using a small number of qubits on a quantum computer could run algorithmically complex aspects of securities settlement trading. In a classical computer, it would need tens of millions of bits to represent the values in trading. It is quite a complex beast of a problem, and would need to run on 200 CPUs with large amounts of memory. (ComputerWeekly.com)