Quantum computing is edging into the world of bank security. D-Wave Quantum and Nasdaq Verafin, the anti-money laundering and fraud technology arm of Nasdaq that serves more than 2,800 financial institutions holding a combined $13 trillion in assets, announced an agreement on August 3, 2026, designed to evaluate whether quantum computing can improve financial crime detection.
Quantum computing technology is still in its nascent stage. It uses quantum mechanics and algorithms to solve complex problems and is expected to make even the most advanced modern supercomputers look bleak in comparison, offering much higher efficiency and speed. As with all powerful tech, global tech leaders are proactive with quantum computing projects, rushing to develop related tools before they go mainstream.
The D-Wave Quantum and Nasdaq Verafin collaboration begins with a proof-of-concept project, with the potential to expand into pilot applications for key anti-financial crime use cases. In plain terms: this isn’t a finished product banks can plug in tomorrow but a test run to see if the technology holds up.
“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,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave.
The project will use D-Wave’s quantum-hybrid technology to help build predictive systems that spot unusual behavioral patterns tied to fraud, scams, and money laundering.
Nasdaq Verafin will run this through D-Wave’s quantum annealing hardware via the Leap quantum cloud service, examining hundreds of data signals at once across account activity, transaction histories, and multi-entity counterparty networks. It would be essentially mapping how accounts, transactions, and the people behind them connect, all at the same time. The goal is to uncover complex relationships across account activity, transaction patterns, and counterparty networks that conventional computing approaches may overlook.
This isn’t D-Wave’s debut in banking. The company already has a multi-year alliance with Mastercard exploring quantum computing for fraud management, anti-money laundering, and loyalty program optimization, signed back in 2023. Pair that with this new Verafin agreement, and the strategy gets some distinctive pattern. Quantum vendors appear to be picking financial-crime network analysis as their first real commercial foothold, well ahead of the more distant, “fault-tolerant” quantum computing use cases the industry has long promised.
It also lands squarely inside a busy earnings cycle. Thus, D-Wave reported its Q2 2026 results on August 6, and shares nudged higher following the Verafin news, part of a broader run of partnership announcements from the company, including one with AT&T just days earlier.
This partnership is one to watch out. No public benchmark data yet shows quantum-hybrid models actually catching fraud or laundering patterns that today’s machine learning tools miss. And yet, given that AI is increasingly used at cybersecurity attackers’ side in sophisticated schemes, using best computing capabilities to oppose that seems a promising direction. Perhaps, the joint Nasdaq/D-Wave project will show the practical benefits (if any) more clearly.
