FinSearchComp: Towards a Realistic, Expert-Level Evaluation of Financial
  Search and Reasoning
Authors: name: Liang Hu; name: Jianpeng Jiao; name: Jiashuo Liu; name: Yanle Ren; name: Zhoufutu Wen; name: Kaiyuan Zhang; name: Xuanliang Zhang; name: Xiang Gao; name: Tianci He; name: Fei Hu; name: Yali Liao; name: Zaiyuan Wang; name: Chenghao Yang; name: Qianyu Yang; name: Mingren Yin; name: Zhiyuan Zeng; name: Ge Zhang; name: Xinyi Zhang; name: Xiying Zhao; name: Zhenwei Zhu; name: Hongseok Namkoong; name: Wenhao Huang; name: Yuwen Tang
Published: 2025-09-16 15:13:13

Abstract: Search has emerged as core infrastructure for LLM-based agents and is widely
viewed as critical on the path toward more general intelligence. Finance is a
particularly demanding proving ground: analysts routinely conduct complex,
multi-step searches over time-sensitive, domain-specific data, making it ideal
for assessing both search proficiency and knowledge-grounded reasoning. Yet no
existing open financial datasets evaluate data searching capability of
end-to-end agents, largely because constructing realistic, complicated tasks
requires deep financial expertise and time-sensitive data is hard to evaluate.
We present FinSearchComp, the first fully open-source agent benchmark for
realistic, open-domain financial search and reasoning. FinSearchComp comprises
three tasks -- Time-Sensitive Data Fetching, Simple Historical Lookup, and
Complex Historical Investigation -- closely reproduce real-world financial
analyst workflows. To ensure difficulty and reliability, we engage 70
professional financial experts for annotation and implement a rigorous
multi-stage quality-assurance pipeline. The benchmark includes 635 questions
spanning global and Greater China markets, and we evaluate 21 models (products)
on it. Grok 4 (web) tops the global subset, approaching expert-level accuracy.
DouBao (web) leads on the Greater China subset. Experimental analyses show that
equipping agents with web search and financial plugins substantially improves
results on FinSearchComp, and the country origin of models and tools impact
performance significantly.By aligning with realistic analyst tasks and
providing end-to-end evaluation, FinSearchComp offers a professional,
high-difficulty testbed for complex financial search and reasoning.