Papers for
banking software developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Banking workflow agents face challenges completing tasks accurately and fully
Bank-World: A Benchmark for Evaluating Agents on Banking Workflows
Abstract: Bank-World is a benchmark of 50 banking tasks across two simulated institutions. Completing banking work requires more than producing the right calculation: agents must reconcile records, obtain permission, execute transactions, and keep instructions and status reports consistent as circumstances change. Bank-World tests these requirements through single-turn assignments and multi-turn interactions with simulated employees who supply information, approve actions, and revise instructions. Grading combines executable checks of recorded actions and state with model judgments of task requirements, including whether valid alternative solutions satisfy them. Across 1,600 attempts by four models, we find that correct decisions often fail to become completed work. Agents charge fees twice, distribute the correct total in incorrect amounts among the recipients, and execute payments while approval is pending. Their strengths also differ: Sol leads single-turn completion, Opus has the highest observed multi-turn completion rate, and Grok succeeds across more multi-turn tasks but less consistently. Bank-World makes these differences inspectable through task-level results and worked examples connecting source evidence, agent decisions, and simulated consequences. We retain the task environments, executable graders, and full trajectories privately to reduce contamination and preserve the benchmark for future evaluations.
AI aids early error detection with precise specs in online banking
Trust the Spec, Not the Code - A Specification-First, AI-Assisted Case Study in Online Banking
Abstract: Formal specification promises early error detection, explicit invariants, and correctness by design, yet its notational cost has kept it out of mainstream practice. We argue that AI removes much of that cost: natural language enriched with lightweight mathematics, written in \LaTeX, can serve as an intermediate specification language that is precise enough to reason over and prove, while a large language model (LLM) reviews it for ambiguity, drafts proofs, and generates the implementation. The specification becomes the artifact one authors, reviews, proves, and refines; the code becomes regenerable output. This paper is a follow-on to a prior study that established the discipline on an organizational-knowledge-growth simulation~\cite{predecessor2026}. Here we replicate the discipline in a different domain---an online-banking fund-transfer service---and extend it. The two domains share one spine: a conservation invariant (knowledge in the prior study, money here), which suggests the approach generalizes across domains. We contribute: (i) a second, independent case study of the method; (ii) a stress-test of the method on a richer problem---\emph{scheduled/recurring} transfers---whose generated code grows substantially while the invariant and its proof do not; (iii) an \emph{AI-proposed runtime coverage model} for invariants (``never violated $\neq$ covered''); and (iv) a Z formalization, including paired success/failure operation schemas and an invariant proved over the inductive set of all reachable configurations, together with an experiment in which the AI proposes the Z interfaces itself. We are explicit about the method's limits: the proofs and runtime checks live at the specification level and do not establish that the generated code refines the specification---that step is delegated to the AI. This is a case study, not a controlled experiment.