The Celent Model Bank Innovation Frontier award recognises the financial institution’s commitment to innovation and willingness to invest and experiment with leading- and even bleeding-edge technologies. NatWest demonstrated such commitment to innovation in 2020 with two separate initiatives: Quantum-Computing-as-a-Service (QCaaS) and Payit.
This is Part I of the award-winning case study, which profiles NatWest’s QCaaS initiative. NatWest’s Payit solution is described in Part II, NatWest: Innovating in Payments via Open Banking.
NatWest completed the initial stages of building an internal Quantum-Computing-as-a-Service (QCaaS) capability. This enables the bank to test the feasibility and potential benefits of using quantum computing over a classical computing approach to address some of the most complex, time-consuming, and expensive business problems. The bank’s developing expertise in working with quantum software and hardware, as well as its ability to reframe business problems so that they can be optimised using quantum computing, puts NatWest in a strong position to take advantage when quantum computing capability becomes more accessible and reaches commercial-grade viability.
