Predictive modeling is a core component of modern financial services, where a wide range of tasks are traditionally addressed using separate models trained on manually engineered tabular features. This task-specific approach limits reuse and makes it difficult to fully exploit heterogeneous data sources such as transaction histories and digital interaction signals. In this paper, we present an approach based on pretraining a foundation transformer model on multimodal sequences of user events. Events from multiple data sources are unified into a single chronological sequence, enabling early fusion of heterogeneous modalities and learning of general-purpose representations via a next-event prediction objective. These representations are combined with existing engineered user features, on top of which lightweight neural models are trained for multiple downstream tasks. The proposed system outperforms traditional task-specific models while reducing development overhead. The approach was deployed in production at one of the biggest banks in Eastern Europe, resulting in measurable improvements in business metrics.
Accurately forecasting the impact of salient financial events on markets is critical for investors and policymakers. However, existing multimodal time-series models typically fuse text and prices symmetrically, without an explicit way to decide when event text is truly predictive, and thus struggle to exploit the directional event-to-price structure and the heterogeneous roles of textual and price signals. In this work, we propose GS-Fuse, a multimodal event-based forecasting framework that employs (i) a Granger-supervised, causal-aware gated fusion module, which learns to open toward event text only when it provides incremental predictive value beyond historical prices, and (ii) a multi-granularity alignment mechanism that jointly aligns high-level event representations and fine-grained textual cues with future market trajectories. Built as a flexible, plug-and-play adapter on top of off-the-shelf large language models and time-series foundation models, GS-Fuse can be instantiated across diverse backbones and market settings. Extensive experiments on real-world financial datasets show that GS-Fuse consistently outperforms state-of-the-art time-series and multimodal baselines across multiple assets and forecasting horizons.
Machine learning research in financial services is limited by the scarcity of representative open-source datasets. Existing resources are often narrowly focused on a single modality or task and fail to reflect the structured, multimodal, and dynamic nature inherent to many problems in financial services. In this paper, we introduce FINESSE, a Financial Event Sequence Simulation Environment, an agent-based simulation framework for generating synthetic, structured datasets composed of multiple interdependent event streams. Each stream corresponds to a distinct financial behavior such as transactions, payments, account status changes, and policy interventions, each with unique action spaces, schemas and variable types. These streams are coupled through agents' latent evolving states, enabling the simulation of temporally rich interactions. We also introduce FINESSE-Bench, a benchmark dataset generated by the simulator, supporting four representative tasks: balance forecasting, transaction fraud detection, missed payment prediction, and next event prediction. We report baseline results using methods from time series forecasting, event sequence modeling, temporal graphs, and temporal point processes. We release the FINESSE framework, including the simulator and dataset to accelerate research on structured, multimodal event sequence modeling challenges in financial services.
Real-world time series come with text: metadata, descriptions, news, reports. Yet time series foundation models process numerical sequences in isolation, and the multimodal text-and-time-series models that attempt to bridge the two all adapt a pretrained language model post hoc, inheriting representations shaped without ever seeing temporal data. These models are also evaluated almost exclusively against other multimodal baselines, not against the strongest unimodal foundation models in either domain, leaving open whether joint training is needed at all. We present Chronicle, a compact 324M-parameter decoder-only transformer trained from scratch on natural language and time series within a single unified architecture. Both modalities share the same transformer blocks, attention mechanism, and residual stream; the bulk of pretraining uses unimodal batches so cross-modal capability emerges purely from shared parameters, with a short alignment stage that interleaves the two. To our knowledge, Chronicle is the first model jointly pretrained on text and time series from scratch, and the first multimodal model evaluated against dedicated foundation models in both domains. It matches Gemma-3-270M-PT on 19 NLU tasks, sets a new bar for frozen-embedding time series classification on 24 UCR/UEA datasets, and produces multimodal forecasts on Time-MMD that beat every supervised fusion baseline, all from a single backbone.