Introduction
As a Strategy Consultant at IBM, you will help reinvent businesses and industries by developing and utilizing specialized knowledge of industry-specific and cross-industry competitive strategies. You’ll manage complex components of an engagement, working closely with clients and their customers to understand their pain points. Your strategic recommendations will drive change in a digitally-enabled era and give you the opportunity to collaborate with highly talented IBMers. Are you ready?

Your Role and Responsibilities
We have entered an exciting new era of information technology with commercial-grade quantum computers that expose a fundamentally different paradigm of representing and processing information. Built on the principles of quantum mechanics, they exploit complex and fascinating laws of nature that can serve as complementary “tools” to enrich our understanding of the world. Following major advancements in quantum technology, from quantum error mitigation protocols, quantum chip clustering and hybrid classical-quantum algorithms, we have entered the commercially relevant phase, where we embark business utility journeys with scalable enterprise solutions that adopt to quantum technology advances in concert with those in classical AI and high-performance computing.

The financial sector is known for its wealth of complex and dynamically evolving business challenges with a long track record of leveraging advances in technology to develop new innovative solutions that produce business opportunities, trust and competitive customer services. At the core of these challenges or business problems are often statistical models that attempt to extract and generalize relevant information from data to provide guidance in financial decision-making processes – from managing risk, financial crime, investments to personalized customer experience. However, all of these models are exposed to trade-offs that are rooted in the probabilistic nature of financial market and customer data with scarce, skewed and evolving patterns and fundamental limitations of classical statistics and algorithms based on limited information processing capabilities on classical computers. Quantum computing provides fundamentally different capabilities that complement classical ones and may offer new ways to address these grand challenges of finance.

IBM is looking for a Quantum Industry Applications Consultant who will provide finance (banking and insurance) industry-specific thought leadership and both technical & business advisory services as part of our world-leading Quantum team of experts. You will collaborate across a network of IBM researchers, computational scientists and other experts together with external parties to drive quantum computing opportunities for finance – from awareness, adoption to the identification of value-guided quantum use cases and respective multi-year innovation journeys in support of C-suite initiatives with strategic clients.

Responsibilities include:

• Create C-suite advisory artifacts and thought leadership for quantum computing in financial services (banking and insurance).
• Identify quantum use cases in financial modelling (advancing data science / quantitative finance models), progress understanding of potential computational applications and anticipate business value implications for clients within financial services.
• Deliver financial industry and technical advisory services to guide clients throughout their Quantum journey.
• Cultivate client relationships and establish quantum eminence within financial services (banking and insurance) industry.
• Work on active client engagements to prepare for use case commercialization within financial services (banking and insurance) industry.

Global travel will be required. Up to 50% or 3 days a week (home on weekends – based on project requirements).

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• Strong financial services industry expertise, such as in retail banking, wealth management, corporate/institutional banking, asset management, investment banking or in quantitative risk management, model validation/auditing or compliance.
• Experience with either data science/machine learning/AI or quantitative finance methods to build probabilistic models that are used for derived business decision making, such as for front-office use cases in client analytics (sales, advisory, pricing) and investing (portfolio management), or for back-office use cases in financial crime (fraud pattern recognition) and risk modelling (credit risk, market risk, etc.).
• Emerging technology background combined with an education background in STEM and some basic knowledge of quantum computing (of which more training will be possible as part of this role).
• 5 years of experience in the financial sector, either as part of financial institutions or auditors/regulators or consulting firms
• 5 years of experience in technical and C-level communications skills
• 5 years of experience creating and presenting thought leadership for public speaking
• STEM Master’s Degree

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• 10 years of experience in the financial sector
• 10 years of experience in technical and C-level communications skills
• 10 years of experience creating and presenting thought leadership for public speaking