financial software teams

Abstract: Financial AI systems must support decision-bearing questions involving payments, collections, cash flow, and compliance while ensuring numerical accuracy, traceability, and auditability. Large language models (LLMs) enable natural language interaction but cannot independently guarantee reproducible calculations or evidence-grounded recommendations. We present a production-grounded architecture integrating three components: a financial knowledge graph for enterprise relationships, temporal context, and provenance; a deterministic optimization engine for financial calculations and decisions; and a multi-agent LLM layer for intent interpretation, task orchestration, explanation, and claim validation. A coordination layer, termed context engineering, selects, ranks, composes, and validates query-specific context across ERP systems, tools, and tenants. Based on observations from 15 deployments over approximately 11 months, single-agent pipelines exhibited hallucination rates of about 7-9% (5-10% across query types), including invented invoices and unsupported financial claims. Graph-backed multi-agent validation reduced observed rates to below 1%, although these findings are observational rather than causal. ERP data quality and tenant-specific schemas remained major implementation challenges. Reusable mappings, graph templates, and validation policies coincided with a reduction in deployment time from roughly six to two weeks. We argue that financial context engineering extends beyond text-centric retrieval-augmented generation by requiring structured relationships, temporal validity, exact numerical evidence, access controls, and validation against source records and solver outputs. We outline research challenges in evaluation, reproducibility, privacy, context quality, and cross-tenant generalization.

Abstract: Payment operations are a critical financial infrastructure, but the value of large language models in this domain remains unclear because payment rules change quickly, evidence is fragmented, and decisions depend on transaction state, participant role, region, and payment rail. Existing benchmarks do not isolate whether failures come from missing payment-rule knowledge, poor use of supplied evidence, or brittleness under imperfect harness inputs. We introduce BENCHCOMPASS, a payment-domain benchmark whose construction pipeline builds scenario-grounded tasks from typed evidence packs, applies LLM-based quality checks, creates task-input attack variants, and reserves final item admission for domain experts. The release contains an expert-reviewed Pro benchmark covering payment knowledge, context-grounded scenario reasoning, and Attacked Open robustness, plus a lower-assurance Normal pool for inspection and future curation. Across 16 model variants, BENCHCOMPASS shows qualitatively different failure modes: missing parametric payment knowledge, incomplete reasoning over supplied rules, and failure to reject plausible but invalid workflows. The benchmark remains unsaturated: the best frontier model reaches 89.6% on Open Context-Grounded Reasoning and 81.7% under attacked inputs, while a representative 32B open-weight model reaches 69.8% and 42.6%. Benchmark data and code are available at https://github.com/ant-intl/BenchCompass.