D-Wave and Nasdaq Verafin Test Quantum Against Financial Crime
D-Wave has signed Nasdaq Verafin to test whether quantum annealing can catch financial criminals better than today’s tools. The proof-of-concept will point D-Wave’s annealer at hundreds of data signals, hunting patterns across accounts and transactions that betray money laundering and fraud. It’s an early experiment, with pilots only a possibility down the line.
Verafin is the reason to pay attention. It’s Nasdaq’s anti-financial-crime software arm, one of the larger names banks and credit unions use to screen for laundering and fraud, so this is a named, serious customer. It counts for D-Wave, whose case rests on having paying users for its annealing machines, the same commercial story behind its move to the Nasdaq exchange and its swinging bookings numbers.
What annealing brings to fraud
D-Wave builds quantum annealers, a specialized kind of machine tuned for optimization and pattern problems rather than general computation. Spotting fraud is partly a pattern problem, as an illicit network hides in the connections between accounts and counterparties, and pulling those relationships out of noise is the sort of task annealing is pitched at.
According to the August 3 press release, Verafin will test whether D-Wave’s technology can surface links across that data that conventional models miss, a claim that belongs to D-Wave until the proof-of-concept backs it up.
Banks have already been circling quantum for this kind of job. NatWest joined a UK program to probe quantum for fraud detection earlier this year, drawn by the same promise, catching what rules-based systems let through.
Still an experiment
This is exploration. The companies will “explore” and “evaluate,” the deal “may” produce predictive systems, and it “could” expand to pilots. Nothing runs in production yet. D-Wave calls itself “the only dual-platform quantum computing company providing both annealing and gate-model systems,” which is its own label. CEO Alan Baratz kept to the pitch:
“This agreement with Nasdaq Verafin provides an important opportunity to explore quantum computing’s potential in addressing some of the financial services sector’s most complex problems.”
Whether it pays off depends on the numbers the proof-of-concept produces, and on how they compare with the classical fraud models Verafin already runs well. The industry is reaching for harder yardsticks to settle questions like that. Some, like benchmarks for real business value, try to quantify the payoff directly; others put hybrid methods on live data, the way IQM tested quantum scheduling on Deutsche Bahn’s rail network. D-Wave, meanwhile, has landed another marquee name willing to hand its machine an actual problem.