In quantum finance at QCE26 the only money saved came from skipping the chip

This guide follows 17 talks and panels on quantum computing in finance from IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto, plus one tutorial sitting. The hardware came close to its baselines on small books, and the one saving in production ran on ordinary computers. On Thursday 17 September, in Room 701A of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, two kinds of progress in quantum computing in finance were reported a few hours apart. They pointed in different directions. In the morning Ruslan Shaydulin of JPMorganChase described a portfolio problem run on qubits protected by error correction, and the chair, Mekena McGrew of Deloitte, said it was the first year the workshop had seen such runs. In the afternoon Valeria Zaffaroni of Intesa Sanpaolo described a program that decides when about 900 of the bank’s cash machines get refilled. Over a year it cut the cost of that cash by 12.7 percent. It used no quantum computer at all. Banks are an early customer for quantum computing because they already run some of the heaviest routine computing outside science. Every night they price contracts whose value depends on thousands of possible futures, and they rebalance portfolios, score loans and plan where cash must…