NatWest is using Fujitsu’s quantum-inspired Digital Annealer to solve highly complex financial risk problems

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Fujitsu announced details of a ground-breaking proof of concept (PoC) project with NatWest for its quantum-inspired Digital Annealer technology. Fujitsu is helping the bank solve some of its most complex, challenging and time-consuming financial investment problems by optimizing its mix of high-quality liquid assets including bonds, cash and government securities.

Financial institutions like NatWest face the continual challenge of creating and maintaining an optimally balanced portfolio of assets, selected from many thousands of options. Ideally, these incorporate a variety of liquid assets that deliver the maximum possible return while helping maintain risk at an acceptable level. While liquidity is of utmost importance to financial institutions, the process involved in calculating the best mix of assets is generally only undertaken infrequently. Traditionally, this is an extremely expensive and time-consuming manual task.

The Fujitsu Digital Annealer processes this type of complex scenario and provides results orders of magnitude faster than today’s traditional computers. NatWest is now implementing quantum-inspired computing power, which has enabled its technology team to complete highly-complex calculations at 3001 times the speed of a traditional computer, with an even higher degree of accuracy.

In addition to performance improvements, the use of Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer also reduces the risk of human error. NatWest can complete a comprehensive risk assessment for its portfolio much faster, as well as gaining access to a far wider range of results and permutations, therefore helping to ensure an optimized spread and reduced risk.

Quantum computing is considered by many to be the ultimate goal for computing sciences, but current quantum computers are limited in their capabilities. Not only are they complex, somewhat unreliable and error prone, they are also few and far between and extremely expensive to operate. Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer represents the perfect bridge to true quantum computing, since it is adept at solving complex combinatorial problems accurately and reliably, and its current processing capability is constantly expanding to address ever more complex problems and scenarios.