Quantum-Safe Trading Systems: Preparing Risk Engines for the Post-Quantum Threat

The Coming Break in Trust

Picture this: a structured BRL-USD note is booked and hedged in 2025, stitched across FX triggers, callable steps, and a sovereign curve that looks stable enough to lull even the cautious. Trade capture is clean, risk logs balance, settlement acknowledges signatures, and the desk moves on. Years pass. The note remains live, coupons roll, collateral terms are amended twice, and the position is referenced by downstream analytics and audit trails that assume the original cryptographic guarantees still hold. Then the ground shifts. Adversaries who quietly harvested network traffic in 2025 now possess hardware that can break the RSA and ECC protections that guarded those artifacts. The trade’s lineage—what was agreed, authorized, and attested — no longer rests on unforgeable proofs. It rests on assumptions that no longer apply.

This is not a scare line for a compliance deck. It is a systems problem with direct pricing consequences. If a payoff confirmation, margin call message, or risk model artifact can be replayed, altered, or repudiated because yesterday’s signatures are breakable tomorrow, the integrity of the entire lifecycle is at risk. You can mark a curve correctly and still be wrong if the attestation that links a payout to a specific state of the world becomes suspect.