IBM unveils next-gen system to safely process key financial data

Tech giant IBM on Tuesday unveiled a new system, billed as industry's first quantum-safe system, that will help customers analyse real-time transactions at scale for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare and financial transactions.

Building on the company's history of security leadership, 'IBM z16' is specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that might be used to crack today's encryption technologies.

"IBM is the gold standard for highly-secured transaction processing. Now with IBM z16 innovations, our clients can increase decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission-critical data lives," said Ric Lewis, SVP, IBM Systems.

This opens up tremendous opportunities to change the game in their respective industries so they will be positioned to deliver better customer experiences and more powerful business outcomes, he added.

IBM z16 uniquely brings together 'AI inferencing' with the highly secured and reliable high-volume transaction processing.

For the first time, banks can analyse for fraud during transactions on a massive scale as IBM z16 can process 300 billion inference requests per day with just one millisecond of latency.

"For consumers, this could mean reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on their credit card," said the company.

For both merchants and card issuers, this could mean a reduction in revenue loss as consumers could avoid frustration associated with false declines where they might turn to other cards for future transactions, it added.

Building on IBM technologies like Pervasive Encryption and Confidential Computing, IBM z16 takes cyber resiliency a leap further by protecting data against future threats that could evolve with advances in quantum computing.

As the industry's first quantum-safe system, IBM z16 is underpinned by lattice-based cryptography, an approach for constructing security primitives that helps protect data and systems against current and future threats.

With 'IBM z16's quantum-safe cryptography, businesses can future-ready their applications and data today, said the company.