McKinsey estimated in the full report of its Quantum Technology Monitor 2026, published April 28, that quantum computing use cases in finance could be worth $400 billion to $600 billion by 2035. McKinsey described the range as “3.0 to 4.5 percent average impact” across seven segments of financial services, from retail banking to risk and cybersecurity.
McKinsey listed expert interviews and “raw data from Panorama Solutions” as the sources for its finance figures. For each segment, it set a financial baseline for 2035, in billions of dollars, and an impact hypothesis, the percentage by which it expects quantum computing to raise that segment’s revenue or cut its costs.
McKinsey labeled its $400 billion to $600 billion estimate indicative and footnoted the impact levers of the use cases behind it as “Impact of QC and AI,” for quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
Disclosure: Quantum Observer’s Editor-in-Chief Marin Ivezic is the founder and CEO of Applied Quantum, a quantum systems integration and consulting firm.
How McKinsey built the figure
On the finance slide of the Monitor’s full report, McKinsey marked its values as rounded and as excluding “black swan breakthroughs.” It classed the impact in six segments as an increase in revenue and the impact in operations and finance as savings. In a footnote, McKinsey wrote, “Savings are vs situation today, not vs future technology alternatives.”
McKinsey also gave each segment a share of the division affected by quantum computing, from 22% for investment banking to 70% for payments, according to the report. For corporate banking, McKinsey listed a 2035 baseline of $3.5 trillion, an impact hypothesis of about 3.5% to 5.5%, a value of $120 billion to $190 billion, and a share affected of 50%.
For risk and cybersecurity, McKinsey listed a $3.1 trillion baseline labeled “Total spend on risk and cybersecurity” in the chart. It set an impact hypothesis of about 3% to 5%, which it classed as an increase in revenue, and listed a value of $95 billion to $155 billion and a share affected of 30%. McKinsey described the sector-wide 3% to 4.5% as a “weighted average from all finance contributors.”
McKinsey’s caveats
On the report’s overview page, McKinsey put quantum computing’s economic value across industries at $1.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion by 2035. “Value estimates are approximate and not definitive projections of business value,” McKinsey wrote on that page. It also wrote that “the incremental impact of QC exhibits an overlap with the impact of gen AI.”
Use cases by segment
In a table of finance use cases, McKinsey listed collateral optimization and real-time lending decisions among the levers for corporate banking. For retail banking, it listed faster credit scoring and personalized finance recommendations. For investment banking, it listed fast derivative pricing, real-time trading, and faster Monte Carlo simulation, a sampling method banks use to price derivatives and measure risk.
For asset and wealth management, McKinsey listed more efficient portfolio allocation and asset modeling. For risk and cybersecurity, it listed faster and broader risk simulations, better fraud detection, and lower compliance costs.
For payments, McKinsey listed lower fraud losses and compliance costs, “quantum money,” and quantum-secure cross-border payments. Quantum money is a proposed scheme in which quantum states serve as banknotes that cannot be copied.
Elsewhere in the same table, McKinsey wrote that “PQC/QKD will be mandatory to enable secure transactions,” referring to post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution. McKinsey footnoted that entry as an overlap with its cyber and security vertical. The entry is McKinsey’s own projection. PQC and QKD are different technologies, and an institution can migrate to PQC without buying QKD.
As an example of impact, McKinsey footnoted an HSBC announcement, “HSBC demonstrates world’s first-known quantum-enabled algorithmic trading with IBM,” from September 25, 2025. HSBC and IBM researchers described that bond-trading trial in a preprint that had not been peer reviewed, as Quantum Observer noted in a review of quantum machine learning results.
Earlier McKinsey figures
McKinsey has published the same range before. In a banking article first published in November 2025 and updated in February 2026, McKinsey’s Henning Soller and Martina Gschwendtner gave $400 billion to $600 billion by 2035. They cited the June 2025 edition of the Monitor as the source.
In an October 2023 article, Gschwendtner, Soller, and Nicole Morgan put the value of quantum computing use cases in finance at $622 billion by 2035. They divided finance into seven segments similar to those in the 2026 Monitor.
Hardware timeline
In the 2026 report’s hardware section, McKinsey wrote that most companies building quantum computers target about 100 to 200 logical qubits by about 2030. A logical qubit is an error-protected unit of quantum information, encoded across many physical qubits in a fault-tolerant computer. McKinsey added that those goals, set by companies using different hardware types, are not “a reliable indicator of actual delivery.”
