arXiv Machine Learning

MortarBench: Evaluating Mortgage Loan Origination Agents

arXiv:2606. 19416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loan origination is the process by which a lender creates a new loan, from application and underwriting through approval and funding.

arXiv AI
Jul 29

Everyone is unique: Towards Behaviorally Heterogeneous Negotiation Dialogue Systems for Debt Collection

arXiv:2607. 25218v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Debt collection is a critical negotiation task in the financial industry, with strong practical relevance and exceptional academic value as a behaviorally rich, high-stakes testbed for human-centered dialogue systems.

By Yuhang Yang, Kai Tang, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang, Qiqi Luo, Jinguang Zheng, Zhixin Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

Foundation Models for Credit Risk Prediction: A Game Changer?

arXiv:2605. 18147v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive models play a pivotal role in credit risk management, guiding critical decisions through accurate estimation of default probabilities and losses.

By Bart Baesens, Andreas Goethals, Stefan Lessmann, Simon De Vos, Cristi\'an Bravo, David Martens, Victor Medina-Olivares, Christophe Mues, Maria Oskarsd\'ottir, Seppe vanden Broucke, Tony Van Gestel, Tim Verdonck, Wouter Verbeke
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Sell More, Play Less: Benchmarking LLM Realistic Selling Skill

The paper introduces SalesLLM, a bilingual (Chinese/English) benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in realistic sales dialogues. It comprises 30,074 scripted configurations and 1,805 curated multi‑turn scenarios from Financial Services and Consumer Goods, with controllable difficulty and personas. An automatic evaluation pipeline uses an LLM judge for sales‑process progress and fine‑tuned BERT classifiers for end‑of‑dialogue buying intent, while a user model, CustomerLM, is trained to improve simulation fidelity. SalesLLM scores correlate strongly with human ratings (Pearson r = 0.86) and reveal that top Chinese LLMs match junior‑to‑intermediate human salespeople but not experts, with cross‑lingual consistency remaining poor.

By Xuanbo Su, Wenhao Hu, Le Zhan, Yuting Xie, Kailin Lyu, Kaijie Chen, Ziwei Li, Yeqiang Wang, Haibo Su, Yunzhang Chen, Ling Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Communicating Credit Risk with Large Language Models: Evaluation of Explanations from Standard and Alternative Data-Based Models

The study investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can translate technical explanations from credit risk models into stakeholder-friendly narratives. Using Freddie Mac loan data, the authors compare standard tabular models (XGBoost + SHAP) with alternative data pipelines (GNN + GNNExplainer and a bimodal mix) and generate explanations with three LLM configurations: a small fine‑tuned Gemma 3 4B, a large fine‑tuned DeepSeek R1 70B, and a zero‑shot Gemini 2.5. Findings show that the quality of explanations is more dependent on the evidence representation than on the LLM, that narratives reliably identify influential factors but are less consistent about the direction of influence, and that credit professionals demand higher evidentiary standards than non‑professionals.

By Sahab Zandi, Noah Kostesku, Christophe Mues, Mar\'ia \'Oskarsd\'ottir, Cristi\'an Bravo
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Enhancing Financial Question Answering: A Novel Benchmark Dataset of Banks' financial statements

FinRAG-QA is a new benchmark dataset for financial question answering, featuring 999 practitioner-curated questions on 10 standardised indicators drawn from 209 annual and Pillar 3 reports of 24 major European and U.S. banks between 2019 and 2023. The dataset focuses on cross‑institutional retrieval over documents averaging 198k words, making it longer than any existing financial QA resource. Experiments on a multi‑stage Retrieval‑Augmented Generation pipeline show that contextual chunk enrichment and a retrieval‑optimised embedding model significantly improve NDCG@10, while a reasoning‑optimised generator boosts answer accuracy from 44.6% to 79.0% when the correct document is retrieved.

By Arianna Miola, Bruno Spaccavento, Lorenzo Silotto, Marco Bianchetti, Luca Cagliero
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Helping Customers in Distress: An LLM-powered Agent that Converses, Probes, and Routes

The paper presents an AI‑powered triaging agent for banks that uses large language models to conduct multi‑turn conversations, ask relevant questions, and classify customer cases for accurate routing to specialist teams. The system is integrated with policy, safety guardrails, and reasoning frameworks, and its performance is evaluated using synthetic digital twins that simulate realistic, labeled dialogues based on historical data. Results show a 30.6% increase in classification accuracy and high satisfaction from subject‑matter experts, demonstrating the effectiveness of targeted probing for scalable banking operations.

By Alankar Atreya, Stefan Sylvius Wagner, Devesh Batra, Robert Hankache, Cristovao Iglesias Jr, Patrick Sinclair, Giulio Pelosio, Michael McMillan, Greig A. Cowan, Raad Khraishi