BMO, a Canadian bank, has filed a provisional patent on a quantum algorithm for seismic forecasting and is sending mobile branches to wildfire zones with AI dispatch. The bank believes this is the future of risk, as banks are traditionally in the business of pricing risk. The launch of the BMO Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence & Quantum was announced last month to consolidate the bank’s research, governance, and applied work in two technologies that have traditionally sat at opposite ends of the maturity curve. However, while quantum computing is still largely a research line, it is largely unproven in deployed banking workflows and has potential commercial applications in insurance, mortgage portfolios, and infrastructure lending. BMO argues that the risks of being late-costly investing in quantum computing outweigh the costs of being early and substantial.