Stories of real impact
Project Leap: preparing financial systems for post-quantum cryptography
The BIS Innovation Hub, Banque de France and Deutsche Bundesbank tested quantum-resistant protection for payment messages, turning a future security risk into a practical migration experiment.
- Sector
- Financial infrastructure
- Organizations involved
- BIS Innovation Hub · Banque de France · Deutsche Bundesbank
- Maturity of the work
- Technical migration experiment · Phase 1
Independent editorial coverage of public industry research. StrategiQ did not participate in the work described and does not claim its results.
The business challenge
Financial systems depend on cryptography to protect messages and sensitive data. A sufficiently capable future quantum computer could break some widely used public-key schemes. The concern includes information intercepted today and retained for later decryption.
This creates a planning problem even before such machines exist: financial data can remain sensitive for years, while changing cryptographic infrastructure takes time. Project Leap set out to test the transition instead of waiting for the threat to materialize.
The approach
In Phase 1, the BIS Innovation Hub worked with Banque de France and Deutsche Bundesbank to implement post-quantum cryptographic protocols between two central bank IT systems. The experiment protected payment messages exchanged between geographically separated systems.
The design combined a traditional public-key algorithm with quantum-resistant algorithms in a hybrid encryption scheme. Post-quantum cryptography here means cryptographic algorithms running on conventional computers; it is not quantum key distribution and does not require a quantum computer.
What was demonstrated
The BIS reports that Phase 1 achieved quantum-resistant confidentiality for the exchanged payment messages and demonstrated that this kind of implementation is feasible. It also identified performance impacts and the need for further testing, important findings for a realistic migration plan.
The report published on June 5, 2023 documents this first phase. The BIS project overview separately describes a later Phase 2 experiment in an operational payment system; those later findings are not treated here as outcomes of Phase 1.
The lesson for business
For financial institutions, quantum readiness is also a security and governance agenda. A practical starting point is understanding where cryptography is used, how long information must remain confidential and which dependencies make migration difficult.
Leap illustrates the value of testing interoperability and performance before a broad rollout. An organization can make concrete progress today through a scoped migration experiment, without predicting an exact date for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.
Sources and further reading
This article is an original synthesis, not a reproduction of the sources. Findings are attributed to the organizations that reported them.
Sources consulted on November 1, 2026.