The first enterprise in France to join the IBM Quantum Network, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, its technology subsidiary Euro-Information, and IBM announced their continued investment in quantum computing.
After a successful initial phase, the organizations have identified specific use cases, among many areas of interest in financial services, for the collaboration’s next “scaling” phase, including: research into customer experience, fraud management and risk management. This phase also intends to explore possibilities for how quantum computing could lead to future improvements in Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale’s customer and employee experience.
“Because banking and insurance are technological industries, it is essential to constantly innovate to master the technologies of the future, and to ensure that they help guarantee sovereignty. Our historic collaboration with IBM is part of this dynamic. Back in 2016, we were among the first financial institutions to apply artificial intelligence and its industrialization. Our ambition for quantum computing is similar: to explore, then industrialize, in order to further transform the banking and insurance businesses, all with the underlying goal of also keeping our customers’ information secure,” said Nicolas Théry, President of Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, and Frantz Rublé, President of Euro-Information.
“Crédit Mutuel is making rapid progress in how to apply quantum technology to enhance financial services. We’re excited to collaborate with them on the ‘scaling’ phase as they expand their activities with an aim toward developing concrete applications that could improve their customers’ experience and transform how the industry manages risk and fraud,” said Sebastian Krause, Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, IBM.
During this phase of the collaboration, Euro-Information, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale and IBM will now begin work on prototyping use cases for fraud management, risk management and improving customer experience. During these activities, Euro-Information will have access to IBM’s latest quantum technologies, including systems with 433-qubit IBM Osprey and 127-qubit IBM Eagle processors, as well as IBM Qiskit Runtime Primitives functions, error mitigation techniques and the first circuit knitting capabilities.
Innovation at the core of Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale and Euro-Information’s technological journey
In 2016, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale began working with IBM to use artificial intelligence to help its employees. A year and a half later, 25,000 advisors at Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale (Crédit Mutuel branches and CIC agencies), were using the tool on a daily basis to reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, such as data entry, signatures, and search. As a result, in 2022, the equivalent work hours of nearly 1,600 full-time employees were freed up for the benefit of customers and members who want a closer relationship with their local adviser.
This successful exploration and integration of AI technologies between Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale and IBM is an example of the progress the companies hope to achieve in the future with quantum computing.
The companies’ joint aim is to combine the performance of current processes that use classical and AI solutions in fraud management, risk management and customer experience, with that of the latest quantum technology, with a future goal of developing applications that deliver a quantum advantage, where a computational task of business or scientific relevance can be performed more efficiently, cost-effectively, or accurately using a quantum computer than with classical computations alone.
Euro-Information is also considering the modalities and advantages of hosting a quantum computer in one of their datacenters in France.
A Quantum Academy to Train Experts to Work in the Quantum Factory
When the initial phase with IBM launched in 2022, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale and Euro-Information involved and trained their employees so that they could understand the subject and the associated opportunities.
The teams are now able to apply what they have learned about quantum computing toward the challenges in banking and insurance, particularly with regard to the use of the IBM-developed Qiskit open-source software suite, and the development of quantum algorithms.
Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale employee skills development will continue to be supported throughout this scaling phase of the project by Euro-Information’s Quantum Academy, which will train technical and business profiles to retain and attract the talent Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale and Euro-Information will need to successfully industrialize the use cases identified in their roadmap.
To support this next phase, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, Euro-Information and IBM will also establish a Quantum Factory, based on the same organizational model as Euro-Information’s Cognitive Factory, which is an on-site collaborative for AI research. Made up of multi-disciplinary teams of experts with business and technical skills, the Quantum Factory will define the scaling phase’s roadmap, continue to develop use cases in order to prepare for quantum’s industrialization for the financial services and insurance industries.
