INDUSTRY WHITE PAPER · EPAA
Quantum-Safe Payments: Why the Payments Industry Must Act Now
Quantum computing threatens the cryptographic foundations of financial services. Payments, from real-time to cross-border settlement, rely on protections that quantum computing will eventually render obsolete, and regulators are already treating harvest-now-decrypt-later as a credible present risk. This paper, produced for the Emerging Payments Association Asia, outlines the structural threat post-quantum cryptography poses to payment infrastructure across SWIFT, real-time gross settlement (RTGS) rails and instant payment schemes, and argues for coordinated industry action — starting with cryptographic-asset inventories, PQC migration roadmaps aligned to the NIST FIPS 203/204/205 standards, and crypto-agility built into wholesale payment authentication.