Muhammad Atif
Payments and banking systems analyst. Quantum-readiness practitioner. Writer of Plain Quantum.
Why I started Plain Quantum
For fifteen years my work has lived where money meets technology: trade finance, core banking platform implementations, and the systems that move cross-border payments between banks around the world.
A few years ago I kept running into the same question in that world: what does quantum computing mean for the encryption that protects all of it? The answers I found were either physics lectures or hype. Neither helped the people who actually have to make decisions.
So I set out to learn it properly, from the threat side through to the new standards. Plain Quantum is me writing down what I learned in the language I'd use with a colleague over coffee.
To be clear about where I stand: my expertise is banking and payments systems, and how organisations plan and govern change. I'm not a physicist or a cryptographer. On the physics, I'm a serious learner (I completed IBM's Qiskit Global Summer School in 2026), which is exactly why I lean on primary sources rather than my own authority.
What I focus on
My professional work centres on quantum-readiness governance for financial services: finding where vulnerable cryptography sits in payment systems, and planning how organisations move to post-quantum standards in a controlled way. On this site I keep it broader and simpler, for anyone who wants to understand the field.
How these articles are written
- Plain, not dumbed down. Simplifications are labelled as analogies. A reader moving on to a technical source shouldn't find that anything here was wrong.
- Sourced. Every article ends with its sources, linking to standards, government guidance and original research, each tagged by what kind of evidence it is.
- Honest about uncertainty. Results, experiments, theoretical possibilities and forecasts are kept apart. There are no predicted dates for when quantum computers will break encryption, because nobody knows.
- Dated and corrected. Each article shows when it was last reviewed. Errors are fixed openly; send corrections to hello@plainquantum.com.
An open reference model of where quantum-vulnerable cryptography appears across the cross-border wire lifecycle, built from public standards.
PQC readiness for payments →A plain-language explainer of the NIST post-quantum standards and what they mean for payment systems.