QC Ware Collaborates with Itaú Unibanco to Improve Customer Retention Models

There are a lot of potential use cases for quantum computing in the banking industry that have been well publicized including Monte Carlo analysis, portfolio optimization, credit scoring, risk minimization, and many others. But QC Ware and Itaú Unibanco, a bank headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil and the largest in Latin America, announced a collaboration to help better model a new potential application for quantum: customer retention. Customer retention is an important issue for many industries so application of this work could have a broad usage. In this four-month project Itaú Unibanco provide QC Ware with two years' worth of anonymized user data and approximately 180,000 data points. Their task was to create a model to predict which customers were likely to leave the bank within the next three months. Many of these optimization and forecasting problems often take a "quantum inspired first" approach. The team developing the application will create a mathematical model for the problem and work to run it initially on a classical computer. Then, as the available quantum computers become more powerful they will convert the model to run on the quantum machines and achieve results that are either faster, more accurate, or can handle a higher number of inputs. This is the approach that QC Ware took in this case and their initial results were quite promising for the bank. QC Ware's initial quantum inspired implementation increased the overall accuracy from 71% to 77.5% from the approach that Itaú Unibanco was previously using. Itaú Unibanco's will be continuing to build quantum expertise within their company and prepare it for additional deployment of quantum computing in its future operations. A press release from QC Ware describing their work with Itaú Unibanco can be accessed here.

May 4, 2022