Quantum computing pioneer D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NASDAQ: QBTS) and Nasdaq Verafin have signed an agreement to explore how quantum-hybrid technology can strengthen the machine learning models that banks use to identify fraud, scams and money laundering — a partnership announced on August 3, 2026 out of Palo Alto and New York.
Proof-of-concept aimed at real bank workloads
The collaboration begins with a proof-of-concept and could expand into pilot deployments across anti-financial-crime workflows. Nasdaq Verafin plans to use D-Wave’s annealing quantum computing technology, accessed through the Leap™ quantum cloud service, to search for subtle relationships across transaction activity, account behavior and counterparty networks that classical models can miss. The initial PoC will assess hundreds of potential data signals simultaneously to sharpen predictive scoring for unusual account behavior.
Why quantum-hybrid for anti-money-laundering
Nasdaq Verafin already provides Financial Crime Management Technology to more than 2,800 financial institutions representing $13 trillion in collective assets, so any meaningful lift in detection quality has an outsized impact on fraud losses and false-positive alert volume. Quantum annealing is well-matched to the combinatorial optimization and pattern-search problems that dominate financial crime detection, where analysts must reconcile enormous multi-entity graphs against thousands of behavioral signals.
“This agreement with Nasdaq Verafin provides an important opportunity to explore quantum computing’s potential in addressing some of the financial services sector’s most complex problems,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave.
Positioning inside D-Wave’s dual-platform strategy
D-Wave is the only quantum computing company offering both annealing and gate-model systems commercially, and its Advantage3 platform now runs with more than 100,000 qubits. The Nasdaq Verafin engagement adds a marquee financial-services validation on top of recent commercial momentum such as the AT&T agentic-AI annealing agreement and the company’s recent Nasdaq listing transfer. It also arrives alongside broader partnership activity across the quantum industry, including the OptQC/NTT one-million-qubit optical alliance announced the same day.
Reporting based on coverage from Business Wire, Yahoo Finance and HPCwire.