Structured Debate Improves Corporate Credit Reasoning in Financial AI
This work addresses the challenge of automating qualitative reasoning for loan evaluation in financial AI, offering incremental improvements in productivity and interpretability for credit risk professionals.
This study tackled the problem of automating evidence-based reasoning in corporate credit assessment by developing two LLM-based systems that generate structured reasoning from non-financial evidence. The debate-based multi-agent system achieved substantial productivity gains (91.97 seconds per case vs. human baseline of 1920 seconds) and higher quality ratings in explanatory adequacy, practical applicability, and usability compared to a single-agent system.
Despite advances in financial AI, the automation of evidence-based reasoning remains unresolved in corporate credit assessment, where qualitative non-financial indicators exert decisive influence on loan repayment outcomes yet resist formalization. Existing approaches focus predominantly on numerical prediction and provide limited support for the interpretive judgments required in professional loan evaluation. This study develops and evaluates two operational large language model (LLM)-based systems designed to generate structured reasoning from non-financial evidence. The first is a non-adversarial single-agent system (NAS) that produces bidirectional analysis through a single-pass reasoning pipeline. The second is a debate-based multi-agent system (KPD-MADS) that operationalizes adversarial verification through a ten-step structured interaction protocol grounded in Karl Popper's critical dialogue framework. Both systems were applied to three real corporate cases and evaluated by experienced credit risk professionals. Compared to manual expert reporting, both systems achieved substantial productivity gains (NAS: 11.55 s per case; KPD-MADS: 91.97 s; human baseline: 1920 s). The KPD-MADS demonstrated superior reasoning quality, receiving higher median ratings in explanatory adequacy (4.0 vs. 3.0), practical applicability (4.0 vs. 3.0), and usability (62.5 vs. 52.5). These findings show that structured multi-agent interaction can enhance reasoning rigor and interpretability in financial AI, advancing scalable and defensible automation in corporate credit assessment.