Financial institutions need to keep up with advances in quantum computing to protect Australians from fraud and scams, Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Michelle Bullock said.
Bullock said this fight would require further innovation, adaptation and cooperation by the payments industry because fraudsters would not stand still in their efforts to steal data and money.
“One important example is the need to protect card users against advances in quantum computing, which is expected to result in current encryption standards being broken sometime in the future,” she said in a speech.
“This requires migrating card payments to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a quantum-safe solution.”
Answering questions after the speech, Bullock was asked if a quantum computer falling into the “wrong hands” was the biggest threat to the payments system.
“Certainly it's something I worry about. If you believe what they say on the tin of quantum computing, what takes 200 years to decrypt now to break will take a matter of minutes. So it is a big threat,” Bullock said.
Financial institutions used advanced encryption standards developed to meet the challenge of quantum computing to keep data safe, “but it's scary”.
“So it is a worry that we need to make sure we keep up with that quantum computing situation, because otherwise it's not safe,” she said.
“I think the banks are well onto it. That's my focus, the financial sector, and I'm very comfortable that they are all taking this on, and they're taking it very seriously.”
Bullock said innovation had also helped to provide banknotes that were secure and trusted by the community, with the use of plastic for banknotes saving more than $1 billion through low levels of counterfeiting and longer circulation life.
“A combination of these new banknotes, and effective law enforcement, helped to reduce counterfeiting once more to low levels – in 2025 you would have to handle, on average, over 165,000 banknotes before you received a counterfeit, compared with approximately 32,000 banknotes in 2015,” she said.
