LLMs in Finance

Presentation slides and workshop curriculum for Large Language Models for Business and Finance: Architecture, Failure Modes, and Defensible Analysis, delivered at the BMO Future Leaders Finance Lab, Schulich School of Business (York University).

Downloads: PowerPoint Presentation (.pptx) · PDF Slides (.pdf) · Hands-On Prompts (.md)

Workshop Structure

The morning consists of five structured teaching cycles. Each cycle adds one level of context and pairs mechanical architecture with enterprise governance:

  1. Foundations: What a language model is, tokenization, logits, temperature scaling, and run-to-run variance.
  2. Multi-Turn Conversations: The stateless HTTP courier, context window attention decay, and quadratic transcript cost curves.
  3. Grounded Context: Project perimeters, document ingestion on primary filings, and information barrier defense.
  4. Tools and Connectors: Deterministic arithmetic delegation via MCP, compounding error theorem, and the Four Practical Checks.
  5. Sub-Agents and Governance: Division of labor across distinct chat sessions, immutable audit dossiers, and OSFI E-23 model risk compliance.

The afternoon is an Investment Committee Simulation: 2.5 hours to conduct an auditable financial review using Goose and corporate filings, producing a verified briefing and cryptographic audit dossier. The day concludes with a LinkedIn project synthesis.

Materials