LONDON, April 8, 2026, 14:25 BST
Lloyds Banking Group said it had completed what it described as the first-known experiment into using quantum computing to identify money mules, working with IBM in a nine-month test that found a deliberately embedded suspect inside anonymised transaction data. The bank said the exercise was designed to sharpen future defences against fraud and scams. 1
The move matters because fraud remains a stubborn cost for UK finance. UK Finance said criminals stole £1.17 billion through unauthorised and authorised fraud in 2024, while the British government last month set out support worth up to £2 billion for quantum technology and said it wanted quantum computers deployed at scale by the early 2030s. 2
A money mule is someone or an account used by criminals to move stolen cash through apparently legitimate payments. Lloyds said the experiment ran on an IBM quantum computer with 156 qubits — the basic units used in quantum machines — to analyse a large web of linked transactions that can be hard for conventional computers to untangle. 3
Ron van Kemenade, Lloyds’ chief operating officer, said financial crime was becoming “more complex and more network-driven” and said the work had helped turn research into practical insights. The bank said it built an internal group of “Quantum Ambassadors”, working with economic-crime specialists and IBM staff through the nine-month project. 4
Scott Crowder, IBM’s vice president of quantum adoption and business development, said the collaboration showed how financial firms could begin “conducting meaningful quantum research”. The companies said the work tested whether quantum algorithms could spot known mule behaviour inside a dense transaction graph, or map of connected payments. 5
Lloyds is not alone. HSBC said in September that a pilot with IBM improved predictions in European corporate bond trading by 34%, a rare early use case cited by a major bank as lenders test quantum systems on narrow commercial problems rather than wait for a full breakthrough. 6
The experiment also fits Lloyds’ broader technology push. In January, the bank raised its profitability target for 2026 and said it expected generative AI to add more than £100 million of incremental profit that year as it scaled the technology across the business. 7
But the fraud project is still a proof of concept, not a live production tool. TechMarketView said the technology remained pre-commercial and that whether it can deliver real operational value on a realistic timetable is still an open question. 8
