Enterprise adoption of large language models in finance is constrained less by fluency than by trust: in Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) and other regulated workflows, an answer is usable only if it is traceable to authoritative sources and auditable after the fact. This paper argues that retrieval-augmented generation for enterprise finance should be evaluated on auditability alongside accuracy, and presents the Knowledge-Driven Analytics Framework (KDAF), which builds ontology-driven knowledge systems through six iterative stages and retrieves evidence via Context-Aware Relevance Propagation (CARP), so that every retrieved fact carries its relationship type, confidence, and source lineage. An evaluation on FinanceBench (145 questions) compares KDAF against zero-context inference, BM25, concept-weighted lexical retrieval, and ungrounded graph traversal. First, retrieval is necessary: zero-context inference reaches 4.1% correctness against 10-12% for retrieval-augmented conditions. Second, on answer correctness the retrieval conditions are statistically indistinguishable (KDAF vs BM25: -0.007, 95% CI [-0.021, 0.000]), so accuracy alone does not justify structured retrieval here -- a negative result we report explicitly. Third, on auditability the ordering reverses: KDAF attains the highest citation traceability F1 (0.515), exceeding ungrounded traversal by +0.027 (CI [0.006, 0.050]) and BM25 by +0.052 (CI [0.024, 0.083]), intervals excluding zero. Graph-structured retrieval also admits no evidence from outside the question subject entity (0 of 426 items, against 16.8% and 20.2% for lexical baselines), and every selected item resolves to a complete provenance chain. We argue that auditability, not accuracy, is the axis on which ontology-grounded retrieval earns its cost.
Wolfgang M. Pauli, Sarah Panda, Kidus Admassu +3cs.AI
Recent advances in large language models have accelerated deployment of agentic systems in operational finance. Existing benchmarks emphasize measuring general capabilities, instruction following, or safety, but few directly address the operational finance workflows that agentic systems are now being deployed to automate. Finance professionals require agents to not only provide factually sound and properly grounded information, but also ensure that this information is verifiable and consistently adheres to rules and constraints of the operational finance domain. We introduce FORCE-Bench, which contains 251 expert-annotated queries and evaluates responses using a rubric-based framework calibrated to the requirements of the operational finance domain, across eight dimensions: accuracy, citations, clarity, depth, groundedness, recency, relevance, and structure. FORCE-Bench assesses agentic systems on three task types: financial obligation research (querying ERP systems for accounts receivable and payable data), financial entity performance research (answering time-bound questions from public filings and market data), and business brief generation (synthesising multi-source company intelligence reports). To reflect real deployment conditions, we evaluate our purpose-built agent, as well as the general-purpose agentic systems, under common tool access and latency-bounded settings. Results show that general-purpose agentic systems do not consistently meet finance-domain quality requirements under operational constraints, while the purpose-built Finance Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot is more reliable across dimensions. We release the dataset, rubrics, harness, and analysis code as open-source to support reproducible comparison and adaptation to other enterprise finance environments.