No Data Is Not No Risk: Visibility Aware Graph-Based Inference of Business Conduct Risk

Corporate default prediction is a core problem in financial risk management, yet traditional credit models rely heavily on financial statements that are often sparse or unavailable for many firms. Corporate transaction networks offer a complementary view of real economic activity, but how risk propagates through buyer-seller relationships remains underexplored. We conduct a large-scale empirical study using real-world electronic tax-invoice data spanning six years that links transaction histories with default events, revealing that transaction-driven risk is both role-dependent (buyer or seller) and scale-dependent. Based on these findings, we construct multiplex buyer-view and seller-view transaction networks and propose DefaultGNN, a dual-perspective graph neural network-based framework for corporate default prediction. DefaultGNN integrates both views to model how risk flows through transactional relationships, achieving strong improvements over both attribute-based and graph-based baselines, especially for firms with limited intrinsic risk signals. We further provide interpretable network-based explanations by visualizing how distressed trading partners contribute to default risk. In collaboration with a licensed credit rating agency, we validate that DefaultGNN's predictions complement existing credit scoring models, improving approval rates by 7-11%p without increasing default risk among approved firms. The source code can be found at https://github.com/jhkim611/DefaultGNN

Financial and economic research often relies on structured supply-chain disclosures and commercial databases. In China, supplier--customer disclosure is typically limited to major partners of listed firms, leaving unlisted firms and long-tail inter-firm links poorly captured in structured data. Public web evidence can partly complement this gap through corporate, government, and trade-media disclosures; however, full-text web mining at scale is costly because pages are often inaccessible or expensive to process with large language models (LLMs). We propose a snippet-driven method for constructing a supply chain knowledge graph (SCKG), with firms as nodes and inter-firm relationships as edges. Web search snippets are query-biased summaries returned with search results. We use them as a scalable first-pass evidence layer for LLM-based relationship extraction. We evaluate the pipeline in terms of extraction efficiency and coverage. For extraction efficiency, exhaustive full-text chunking discovers 19.8$\times$ more unique relationships than snippets, but requires 251.2$\times$ more input tokens and yields higher redundancy. For coverage, we use 130,685 Chinese firms as search seeds, covering Shanghai/Shenzhen-listed firms and large unlisted firms as of 2024. In the listed-firm subset, the resulting SCKG covers 7.2$\times$ more firms and 9.3$\times$ more relationships than the CSMAR disclosure-based benchmark, while revealing heavy-tailed degree patterns. Retained provenance metadata make the SCKG an auditable complement to disclosure-based databases.

Financial markets evolve in response to real-world events reported in news, yet these drivers often remain implicit in text. To better explain market dynamics, event-market relations must be explicitly modeled through factual, company-centric, and environment-aware knowledge graphs. We present FinKG-News, a framework that automatically constructs such graphs by extracting news events as anchors linked to companies. Using FinKG-News as grounded evidence that integrates events, news, and company data, we develop an in-context learning architecture for credit risk report generation across three core financial dimensions. Automatic and human evaluations show that automated hallucination detection and quality assessment remain unreliable, making expert judgment indispensable. Our approach consistently outperforms baselines, improving quality by 19%-34% while reducing hallucinations. The source code and project resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/ichise-laboratory/FINKG-news.