Multinational bank HSBC has opened a Quantum Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Singapore, its second hub after London.
The move comes after the country’s financial services regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched a major sector-wide quantum security initiative at the end of last year.
HSBC’s new facility will focus on post-quantum cryptography (PQC), quantum key distribution (QKD), and infrastructure resilience, while also exploring how quantum computing might enhance financial modelling, optimisation and machine learning.
The launch goes beyond cryptography and cybersecurity as it will involve rigorous testing of software platforms, cryptographic protocols and AI-driven applications under conditions far more demanding than traditional QA cycles.
For banks and insurers, the shift towards quantum technologies is directly tied to the work of quality assurance and software testing teams, who will be tasked with validating whether complex new systems are resilient, crypto-agile and compliant with regulatory demands.
For HSBC, the Singapore launch is an extension of a programme it began in 2019, when it first tested the application of quantum computing to securities clearing and settlement.
Since then, the bank has expanded experiments across business areas, viewing quantum capabilities as one of the most powerful tools for protecting interconnected financial systems.
“You have to make your new software platforms crypto-agile so you can rotate between different algorithms,” said Philip Intallura, HSBC’s global head of quantum technologies.
He described how HSBC has already deployed QKD links between its Canary Wharf headquarters and a Berkshire data centre, allowing the bank to exchange keys and encrypt applications ranging from video calls to data transfers.
At the end of 2023, HSBC demonstrated what it called “the world’s first FX trade on a commercial QKD network” by simulating a €30 million EUR/USD trade through its AI Markets platform.
“The front end connected out of Canary Wharf and the information was retrieved from the back end in Berkshire through this quantum network,” Intallura said. “Effectively, the simulated trade was encrypted with quantum keys and sent between the two sites.”
He stressed this was a learning exercise in performance, stability, testing and operational integration. “It gives you a flavour of the sorts of things we’re doing to test how this technology may apply to our critical applications.”
Quantum: promise and peril
Intallura is clear about the dual nature of quantum computing. On the one hand, it could revolutionise financial simulation, risk optimisation and machine learning, areas where banks already deploy advanced computation. On the other, it represents an existential threat to today’s encryption standards.
“Quantum computing brings a lot of risk when it comes to breaking public key cryptography,” he warned. With HSBC serving 41 million customers and processing 4.5 billion transactions annually, the implications are vast.
“This sector does need to take the emerging threat of vulnerable computers very seriously.”
The danger is not hypothetical. In late 2024, UK Finance, the UK banking association, cautioned members that quantum computing could unravel the cryptography protecting the country’s entire payments system.
Governance and strategy
Intallura argued that quantum security must now be on boardroom agendas. “The single most important step is to make sure your board are having conversations about quantum computing and the emerging threats that they pose. Transforming cybersecurity in a financial services organisation is going to be long, complex and expensive.”
In 2023, HSBC worked with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) to sketch a four-step quantum-security framework.
The first step is awareness and preparation, assessing current cryptographic infrastructure and building internal skills.
The second is clarification, mapping regulatory requirements across regions, identifying gaps, and defining objectives.
The third is transition strategy, prioritising applications, designing protocols with vendors and regulators.
The fourth is implementation and monitoring, modernising ecosystems with crypto-agile platforms that can rotate algorithms if new ones are broken.
“If someone works out how to break a new algorithm, you don’t want to re-engineer your ecosystem,” Intallura said. “That’s why agility is the key.”
Singapore: A quantum sandbox for finance
Singapore has become a global testbed for quantum finance. In 2024, the country’s regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) signed a memorandum of understanding with HSBC, DBS, OCBC, UOB and partners SPTel and SpeQtral to develop and test QKD networks for secure communications.
“As quantum technology advances, it is vital for the financial sector to safeguard against potential cybersecurity threats,” said Vincent Loy, MAS’s assistant managing director for technology.
“These trials can inform and shape cyber-risk management policies towards quantum-proofing our financial systems.”
MAS followed up with a February 2024 advisory warning the financial sector to prepare now rather than wait.
Intallura agrees. “It’s important not to be fooled into thinking that because cryptographically relevant quantum computers are still some years away, you should take a wait-and-see approach.”
Quantum is only part of Singapore’s wider digital resilience playbook. MAS previously committed $75 million to AI testing environments for banks, designed to evaluate model behaviour under stress and regulatory criteria.
It has also established the Cyber and Technology Resilience Experts (CTREX) Panel to guide the sector on resilience, AI assurance and technology supply-chain risk.
In 2025, the watchdog warned banks about their reliance on third-party and open-source software, calling such dependencies “frontline vulnerabilities.” It now expects firms to maintain live inventories of software supply chains and to conduct unscripted disaster-recovery drills.
MAS has also launched the Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN), connecting Singapore’s ecosystem with global partners to accelerate innovation in areas such as AI, payments, and quantum technologies.
Implications
For QA and testing teams, the significance is immediate. They will be required to validate not only functional performance but also resilience against emerging quantum and AI-related risks.
In practice this means penetration testing against post-quantum algorithms, regression testing to ensure systems can rotate seamlessly between encryption standards, and sandbox trials where AI-driven financial models are exposed to quantum-inspired attacks or simulated failures.
QA engineers will also need to verify the stability of QKD links under real-world conditions, measure latency and error rates in encrypted trades, and confirm that third-party software does not undermine crypto-agility.
Stress tests that once focused on transaction loads will increasingly need to model how systems behave when cryptographic protocols are swapped or when AI models generate unexpected outputs under adversarial pressure.
In short, testing is becoming the frontline of resilience. As HSBC’s experiments demonstrate and MAS’s policies enforce, financial services firms will rely on their QA teams to prove that critical systems can withstand not only today’s risks but the disruptive threats of the post-quantum era.
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