FinReasoning: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Reliable Financial Research Reporting

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in financial research workflows, where their role is evolving from single-model assistance for human analysts toward autonomous collaboration among multiple agents. Yet recent real-world deployments reveal persistent failures such as factual errors, numerical inconsistencies, and shallow analysis, which can distort assessments of corporate fundamentals and trigger severe economic losses. While existing benchmarks have begun to evaluate such failures, they score all aspects of the generated analysis in one pass, failing to distinguish whether a model fails at foundational stages like auditing and correction, or underperforms at generating research-grade insights. Consequently, it obscures capability bottlenecks and the specialized strengths essential for multi-agent role assignment. To address these gaps, we introduce FinReasoning, a hierarchical benchmark that decomposes the core capabilities of financial research into semantic consistency, data alignment, and deep insight. We further propose a fine-grained evaluation framework that strengthens hallucination-correction assessment and incorporates a 12-indicator rubric for core analytical skills. FinReasoning reveals clear capability stratification across model types. Closed-source models (like Doubao-Seed-1.8) perform strongly overall and are better suited for core reasoning agents in multi-agent financial systems; open-source general models (like Qwen3-235B) show clear capability divergence and consistently underperform on Semantic Consistency, making them less suited for quality-sensitive generation tasks; financial-domain models (like Fin-R1) generate moderate insights but lack foundational auditing skills, requiring upstream quality control for domain-specific analysis. Our work provides a reliable evaluation foundation for multi-agent financial application systems and has already been deployed in pilot tests across several real-world scenarios. The resource is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinReasoning.