# LendNova: Towards Automated Credit Risk Assessment with Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02573 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02573/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10063/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models in Finance: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10723/) (2023)
- [PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05443/) (2023)
- [FinBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Financial Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08097/) (2020)
- [WHEN FLUE MEETS FLANG: Benchmarks and Large Pre-trained Language Model for Financial Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00083/) (2022)
- [Two Failures of Self-Consistency in the Multi-Step Reasoning of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14279/) (2023)
- [Mixing It Up: The Cocktail Effect of Multi-Task Fine-Tuning on LLM Performance -- A Case Study in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01109/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning vs. Gradient Boosting: Benchmarking state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for credit scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10535/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Fair outputs, Biased Internals: Causal Potency and Asymmetry of Latent Bias in LLMs for High-Stakes Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15217/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Credit risk assessment is essential in the financial sector, but has traditionally depended on costly feature-based models that often fail to utilize all available information in raw credit records. This paper introduces LendNova, the first practical automated end-to-end pipeline for credit risk assessment, designed to utilize all available information in raw credit records by leveraging advanced NLP techniques and language models. LendNova transforms risk modeling by operating directly on raw, jargon-heavy credit bureau text using a language model that learns task-relevant representations without manual feature engineering. By automatically capturing patterns and risk signals embedded in the text, it replaces manual preprocessing steps, reducing costs and improving scalability. Evaluation on real-world data further demonstrates its strong potential in accurate and efficient risk assessment. LendNova establishes a baseline for intelligent credit risk agents, demonstrating the feasibility of language models in this domain. It lays the groundwork for future research toward foundation systems that enable more accurate, adaptable, and automated financial decision-making.