FrontierFinance: A Long-Horizon Computer-Use Benchmark of Real-World Financial Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to financial analysis, reporting, investment decision support, risk management, compliance, and professional training. However, robust evaluation of their domain competence in finance remains incomplete. Widely used open benchmarks such as FinQA, ConvFinQA, and TAT-QA have played an important role in advancing financial question answering and numerical reasoning, but they focus primarily on question answering over financial reports and do not provide an explicit hierarchy of professional difficulty. Broader resources, including FinanceBench, PIXIU, FinBen, and FLaME, expand the coverage of financial tasks, yet the problem of evaluating the transition from foundational knowledge to expert-level financial reasoning remains open. In this work, we present FINESSE-Bench, a suite of eight specialized benchmarks comprising 3,993 questions for hierarchical evaluation of financial competencies in LLMs. FINESSE-Bench combines exam-oriented datasets inspired by professional certifications (CFA-like Levels 1-3, CMT-like Level 2, and CFTe-like Level 1), applied trading task collections, and a Russian-language olympiad benchmark. This design enables evaluation of domain breadth, performance degradation as difficulty increases, the ability to solve computational tasks, and model behavior in specialized financial domains. We also describe a unified evaluation protocol covering multiple-choice questions, numerical answers, and short open-ended responses, together with an automated scoring scheme for freeform answers based on the LLM-as-judge paradigm. FINESSE-Bench is intended both as a complement to existing open financial benchmarks and as a tool for more substantive evaluation of professionally relevant financial competencies in large language models.

Evaluating financial AI agents requires criteria aligned with real professional work. Existing rubric methods typically derive criteria from task prompts or model outputs, overlooking tacit standards visible only in practitioner deliverables. We introduce FinProBench, a benchmark for professional financial tasks, and Role-Grounded Rubric Construction (RGRC), a reusable pipeline that derives rubrics from deliverables produced by practitioners in the same role. RGRC comprises four stages: Deliverable Collection, Competency Extraction, Rubric Synthesis, and Validation. Its rubrics capture tacit standards, distinguish quality levels, and transfer across tasks within a role. Before analysis, we classified 57 occupations by deliverable genre into 30 prior-rich conventional roles and 27 prior-sparse role-specialized roles. Across all roles, Prompt-only nearly matches RGRC for conventional roles (89.2% vs. 90.7%), but RGRC substantially outperforms it for role-specialized roles (99.1% vs. 78.0%). This split indicates that prompt engineering can approximate rubrics when conventions are well represented in model priors, while professional grounding is essential for standards beyond those priors. FinProBench is built from 1,723 curated deliverables spanning 57 occupations, 8 financial sub-industries, and 161 deliverable types, and releases an initial evaluation set of 20 complete tasks covering 20 roles in 7 sub-industries. With heterogeneous LLM judges and role-level rubrics, human deliverables rank first on average (73.7 vs. 70.3, 70.2, and 69.6 out of 100), while all four systems show overlapping 95% confidence intervals and complementary strengths. Reusing rubrics at the role level reduces estimated per-task construction effort by 6.7 times relative to authoring each rubric from scratch.

Large language models are becoming increasingly significant in financial applications. Nevertheless, prevailing benchmarks are largely dependent on simulated or generic data, which leads to a significant gap between reported performance and actual efficacy in real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we present BizFinBench.v2, the first integrated offline and online benchmark built upon authentic user query-response data from both Chinese and U.S. equity markets. It comprises 28,860 questions across eight offline and two online tasks. Experimental results show that GPT-5 achieves a mere 61.5% accuracy, still failing to meet the practical business requirement (84.8%). Among the evaluated commercial models, DeepSeek-R1 exhibits superior investment efficacy. Error analysis grounded in real financial practice reveals persistent limitations in existing models. By overcoming the constraints of prior benchmarks, BizFinBench.v2 provides a substantiated foundation for advancing LLM deployment in the financial sector. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/HiThink-Research/BizFinBench.v2.