Wall Street’s new arms race: HSBC’s quantum computer just beat every trading algorithm on the planet by 34% 😳📈; $19.2M-backed protocol to unlock autonomous AI commerce 🤖💳

FinTech is Eating the World, 25 September

Hey Everyone,

Good morning & happy Thursday! Today’s issue is definitely the best one yet as we’re looking into HSBC, whose quantum computer just beat every trading algorithm on the planet by 34% (what this means & why it’s the Wall Street’s new arms race + bonus dive into other quantum breakthroughs & more reads on AI + Finance), and a new $19.2M-backed protocol that wants to unlock autonomous AI commerce (what it’s all about, why it could be huge and what’s next in the agentic AI era for finance + bonus dives into Coinbase’s x402 protocol & more resources inside). So let’s just jump straight into the interesting stuff 🌶️

Wall Street’s new arms race: HSBC’s quantum computer just beat every trading algorithm on the planet by 34% 😳📈

The BIG News 🗞️ Banking giant HSBC HSBC 0.00%↑ has just announced what it describes as the world-first breakthrough in applying quantum computing to financial markets, achieving a 34% improvement in predicting bond trade execution probabilities using IBM’s IBM 0.00%↑ most advanced Heron quantum processor.

The London-headquartered bank tested the technology on an extensive dataset of European corporate bond trades, analyzing over 1 million trade requests across more than 5,000 bonds spanning from September 2023 to October 2024.

Let’s take a look at this, understand why it matters, and what this means for the future of finance.