FinRank: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Financial Question Answering and Retrieval over SEC Filings

Financial question answering over SEC filings faces a subtle challenge: answers can be numerically correct yet grounded in wrong evidence, since similar facts recur across filing sections, time periods, and companies. FinRank introduces a benchmark of 1,185 expert-authored questions with gold evidence and curated hard negatives to specifically test provenance-sensitive retrieval. This is valuable for financial analysts, compliance teams, and fintech developers building QA systems over regulatory filings, where the paper's baseline results—showing even strong embedders struggle significantly with hard negatives—highlight the need for retrieval systems that verify evidence grounding, not just answer correctness, in high-stakes financial contexts. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07400