BBVA & Multiverse Showcase How Quantum Computing Could Help Optimize Investment Portfolio Management

(HPC.Wire) BBVA in collaboration with Spanish startup Multiverse has evaluated and benchmarked a number of quantum and traditional technologies to improve the process of dynamically optimizing investment portfolios with market data. The results, published in a scientific paper, have allowed identifying unexplored methods to carry out these calculations that would allow maximizing the potential returns of investments.
“The purpose of this collaboration, still in an exploratory phase, has been to determine what weights in an investment portfolio containing certain assets yield higher returns and, in financial terms, we have come up with a way to optimize these calculations that hadn’t been considered until now. Methods based on quantum computing and quantum-inspired methods are new and can improve the current tools that are already in practice,” explains BBVA head of Research and Patents discipline Escolástico Sánchez. Sánchez is one of the authors of this paper together with doctors Román Orús, Enrique Lizaso and Sam Mugel, from Multiverse Computing; as well as BBVA global head of Research and Patents, Carlos Kuchkovsky; and Jorge Luis Hita and Samuel Fernández, members of BBVA’s quantum algorithms team.
As Dr. Román Orús, co-founder and CSO at Multiverse Computing explained, “we have implemented the optimization with real market data for the first time applying a variational algorithm for IBM-Q, a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for D-Wave and, for the first time internationally in a financial context, using Tensor Networks’ ‘quantum-inspired’ algorithms.”
Multiverse is a Spanish tech startup that specializes in developing quantum algorithms for the international financial sector. The company is run by a prestigious team of experts in quantum physics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, mathematics and economics. Since it launched, it has garnered support from tech accelerators and hubs in the Basque Country such as the Donostia International Physics Center and BIC Gipuzkoa, as well as Canada’s Creative Destruction Lab.