Public Funding for Standard Chartered Bank

**The Opportunity:** Financial institutions need to continuously interpret complex data streams to extract information necessary for providing accurate credit risk evaluation, managing market-making services, and predicting emissions in the context of green finance. Current classical machine learning (ML) techniques used to assist and provide insights to these services have limitations as these data streams evolve in complexity. There are three key challenges that financial institutions are seeking to address in an effort to improve their offerings: (1) Providing clients accurate credit-risk evaluation services, (2) Offering competitive rates for market-making services, and (3) Predicting emissions for informed sustainable finance decisions in line with ESG targets. Improving upon the current classical ML approaches could result in reduced risk, better market rates and targeted sustainable investments for financial institutions and their customers. **The Approach:** Recent quantum computing advances have the potential to offer significant improvements to the computations financial institutions rely on to improve upon efficiency, to reduce risk, to provide better service to customers and to develop personalised products. The team's offering using cutting-edge quantum machine learning techniques, running on an optimised full-stack Rigetti platform, will offer financial institutions a vertically integrated solution, allowing them to use the full capability of NISQ-era quantum computing. We will develop quantum signature kernels and leverage the results to enhance Rigetti's recent breakthroughs in quantum kernels. We will benchmark the results against classical ML methods for streamed data. Additionally, we will build and study quantum algorithms for computing efficient signatures and their inner products for long and high-dimensional data streams. **Innovation and Benefits:** A successful project outcome will have significant benefits for the UK financial sector and the quantum computing industry, including the participating organisations. Accelerating the development of quantum machine learning for financial data streams will enable Standard Chartered to be an industry leader in a future quantum-ready economy and continue to provide the best possible services to its clients. Developing quantum-enabled solutions will also bolster the UK finance sector. Rigetti will be able to accelerate its work to achieve narrow quantum advantage, the point at which a quantum computer outperforms the best classical resources. The project will also benefit Imperial College London by providing a framework for and use cases to test new quantum machine learning tools. Making these tools open access will further allow UK academics to test state-of-the-art quantum algorithms for their own applications (possibly beyond those in this proposal).

Rigetti Computing, Oxford Instruments, Standard Chartered, Phasecraft, and the University of Edinburgh will collaborate to advance quantum computing in the UK. The team will address several key aspects of quantum computing including: 1) hardware, infrastructure, and supply chain; 2) accelerating industrial applications; and 3) developing the quantum ecosystem to help solve important but currently intractable problems. This work positions the UK as a global leader in the emerging quantum industry, expected to be £4B by 2024, growing to £350B/year by 2050\. The project's main focus area are: _**1\. Infrastructure deployment**_ Rigetti will leverage its London-based team to assemble and operate a quantum computer in the UK, accessible via the cloud. This new investment into the UK's growing technology sector is an important milestone---no commercially available quantum computing platform currently exists in the UK. To support the infrastructure, Oxford Instruments will mature cryogenic technology reliability and provide initial hosting. To maximise long-term value, the team will migrate the infrastructure to align with national strategic initiatives such as the UK National Quantum Computing Centre. _**2\. Core applications development**_ Building on the infrastructure, the applications development team will validate the value of quantum computing to end users in the UK's economy. The approach builds on academic research and industry-led quantum software capability in the UK to transition knowledge to economic value. Phasecraft, a UK quantum software start-up, will build a quantum simulation work package that brings quantum computing to end users in the most promising near-term application area---quantum chemistry. Phasecraft is a UK quantum software start-up, founded by quantum computing researchers Toby Cubitt, Ashley Montanaro, and John Morton. From the University of Edinburgh, Professor Elham Kashefi's group will deliver quantum hardware verification and testing, with a focus on machine learning applications. They will also collaborate with Standard Chartered, complementing their work on financial synthetic data generation (Kondratyev & Schwarz, "The Market Generator"). _**3\. Broad initiatives to grow the UK's quantum computing sector**_ To demonstrate value beyond this project, the consortium will develop the UK's nascent quantum ecosystem to extend industry capabilities in finance, energy, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and automotive. Through existing relationships and forums, the consortium will expand the community by delivering workshops, computing credits, and technical support, helping end users to validate their research and business concepts.