Quantum for Finance and Telco

If you have been following along here this month, then you know I have been in the middle of this fun blog series, digging into quantum. This has truly been an interesting deep dive into what’s on the horizon vertically. If you read my Connected World blog to kick off the month, then you know I unpacked the basics of quantum. Last week, I dove deeper into quantum in manufacturing and in medical. Today let’s turn our attention to two new verticals: finance and telco.

Quantum in Finance

McKinsey & Co., suggests quantum technology will impact many industries, but there are four big ones that will see the most growth including chemicals, life sciences, finance, and mobility industries. Let’s take a moment to count our way into the numbers by looking at the financial picture.

A study released near the end of 2025 from IBM and Vanguard looks at how quantum can construct optimized portfolios in real-world constraints. The research leveraged sampling-based VQA (variational quantum algorithm).

In this study, the team used 109 qubits of the 133 available on an IBM Quantum Heron r1 processor, executing circuits with up to 4,200 gates. The quantum samples were then refined using a classical local search algorithm to further improve solution quality.

The results found the quantum-classical workflow consistently outperformed a purely classical local search approach, especially as problem size increased.

Quantum in Telco

Amazon suggests physics, chemistry, cryptography, material science, and optimization problems are the core application areas of quantum computing. It also suggests the telco space can potentially benefit from quantum.

With that in mind, when we zero in on the telco industry, it becomes clear quantum can help design efficient network topology, assign channels to wireless equipment, optimize the flow of different types of traffic through a network, and allocate bandwidth to different services or users in a shared network.

Other potential applications in this space include scheduling tasks on network resources, placing a minimum number of monitoring devices in a network, finding paths through a network, and allocating network resources to create virtual network slices for different services with varying requirements.

Amazon suggests solving many of these problems at scale is complex because computation and time to find an exact solution increase exponentially with the problem size. Thus, this is where quantum can help in the telco space.

Quantum in Construction

Just a reminder, if you want a closer look at quantum in the construction industry, head on over to my Constructech blogs this month. There I am taking a deeper dive on the impact of quantum computing in the construction industry.

Of course, we’ve now folded these two verticals into our expanding industry list, coupling them with the others to create a more complete picture of where quantum is making its mark.

But the real questions are the pace at which this evolution will unfold and what vertical is ripe for disruption as the rise of quantum emerges.

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The post Quantum for Finance and Telco first appeared on Connected World.