Dataset Card for FINCH - Financial Intelligence using Natural language for Contextualized SQL Handling

A comprehensive collection of SQLite databases from the FINCH benchmark, containing 33 databases with 292 tables and 75,725 natural language-SQL pairs across diverse financial domains for Text-to-SQL research and development.

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

Curated by: Domyn
Authors: Avinash Kumar Singh, Bhaskarjit Sarmah, Stefano Pasquali
Language(s): English
License: CC-BY-NC-4.0

FINCH (Financial Intelligence using Natural language for Contextualized SQL Handling) provides SQLite database files from a carefully curated financial Text-to-SQL benchmark that consolidates and extends existing resources into a unified, finance-specific dataset. Each database preserves original schema structure, relationships, and data while focusing specifically on financial domains and applications.

This dataset addresses a critical gap in Text-to-SQL research: despite significant progress in general-domain benchmarks, financial applications remain especially challenging due to complex schemas, domain-specific terminology, and high stakes of error. FINCH provides the first large-scale, finance-oriented Text-to-SQL benchmark suitable for both evaluation and fine-tuning.

Dataset Sources

Paper: FINCH: Financial Intelligence using Natural language for Contextualized SQL Handling (coming soon)

Key Features

• 33 SQLite databases specifically curated for financial applications
• 292 tables with 2,233 columns and 177 relations
• 75,725 NL-SQL pairs for comprehensive training and evaluation
• Financial domain focus including retail, banking, insurance, e-commerce, funds, stocks, and accounting
• Direct SQLite format - ready for SQL queries and analysis
• Preserved relationships - foreign keys and indexes intact
• Multi-difficulty coverage with easy, medium, and hard query complexity levels

Dataset Structure

The dataset is organized by financial domain with meaningful database names:

File Organization

finch/
├── spider/           # 22 SQLite files (financial subset from Spider)
├── bird/             # 7 SQLite files (financial subset from BIRD)
├── bull/             # 3 SQLite files (BULL/CCKS financial data)
└── book_sql/         # 1 SQLite file (BookSQL accounting data)

Financial Domains Covered

Retail & E-commerce

• customers_and_invoices: E-commerce customer and billing systems
• e_commerce: Online retail transactions and order management
• department_store: Retail chain operations and inventory management
• shop_membership: Customer loyalty and membership programs

Banking & Financial Services

• financial: Czech bank transactions and loan portfolios (1M+ records)
• small_bank: Banking account management systems
• loan_1: Loan processing and customer account data

Insurance & Risk Management

• insurance_policies: Insurance claims and policy management
• insurance_and_eClaims: Electronic claims processing systems
• insurance_fnol: First notification of loss handling

Investment & Trading

• ccks_fund: Mutual fund management and performance data
• ccks_stock: Stock market data and trading information
• tracking_share_transactions: Investment portfolio tracking

Sales & Marketing

• sales: Large-scale sales transactions (6M+ records)
• sales_in_weather: Sales data correlated with external factors
• customers_campaigns_ecommerce: Marketing campaign effectiveness

Accounting & Financial Reporting

• accounting: Complete accounting system with 185+ tables covering transactions, customers, vendors, and financial reporting
• school_finance: Educational institution financial management

Dataset Format & Examples

Data Files Structure

• finch_dataset.json: Main dataset file with 75,725 NL-SQL pairs (appears in HF dataset viewer)
• schemas/database_schemas.yaml: Database schema metadata for all 33 databases (auxiliary file)
• text2sql-db/: SQLite database files organized by source (auxiliary files)

Sample Data from finch_dataset.json

[
    {
        "question_id": 1,
        "db_id": "financial",
        "db_name": "bird",
        "question": "How many accounts who choose issuance after transaction are staying in East Bohemia region?",
        "partition": "dev",
        "difficulty": "medium",
        "SQL": "SELECT COUNT(t2.account_id) FROM district AS t1 INNER JOIN account AS t2 ON t1.district_id = t2.district_id WHERE t1.a3 = 'east bohemia' AND t2.frequency = 'poplatek po obratu'"
    },
    {
        "question_id": 2,
        "db_id": "financial", 
        "db_name": "bird",
        "question": "How many accounts who have region in Prague are eligible for loans?",
        "partition": "dev",
        "difficulty": "easy",
        "SQL": "SELECT COUNT(t1.account_id) FROM account AS t1 INNER JOIN loan AS t2 ON t1.account_id = t2.account_id INNER JOIN district AS t3 ON t1.district_id = t3.district_id WHERE t3.a3 = 'prague'"
    },
    {
        "question_id": 3,
        "db_id": "financial",
        "db_name": "bird", 
        "question": "The average unemployment ratio of 1995 and 1996, which one has higher percentage?",
        "partition": "dev",
        "difficulty": "easy",
        "SQL": "SELECT DISTINCT IIF(AVG(a13) > AVG(a12), '1996', '1995') FROM district"
    }
]

Schema Information (schemas/database_schemas.yaml)

The schemas/database_schemas.yaml file contains comprehensive schema metadata for all databases:

financial:
  db_id: financial
  table_names_original:
    - account
    - card
    - client
    - disp
    - district
    - loan
    - order
    - trans
  table_names:
    - account
    - card
    - client
    - disposition
    - district
    - loan
    - order
    - transaction
  column_names_original:
    - [-1, "*"]
    - [0, "account_id"]
    - [0, "district_id"]
    - [0, "frequency"]
    - [0, "date"]
  column_types:
    - text
    - number
    - number
    - text
    - text
  foreign_keys:
    - [2, 1]
    - [4, 2]
  primary_keys:
    - 1

Example Usage

Loading with Python

Primary Method: Using datasets library (Recommended)

from datasets import load_dataset
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
import sqlite3
import yaml

# Load the main dataset using HuggingFace datasets library
dataset = load_dataset("domyn/FINCH")
print(f"Dataset: {dataset}")
print(f"Number of examples: {len(dataset['train'])}")

# Access individual examples
sample = dataset['train'][0]
print(f"Question: {sample['question']}")
print(f"SQL: {sample['SQL']}")
print(f"Database: {sample['db_id']}")
print(f"Difficulty: {sample['difficulty']}")

# Load schema information for the database
schema_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id="domyn/FINCH", filename="schemas/database_schemas.yaml")
with open(schema_path, 'r') as f:
    schemas = yaml.safe_load(f)

# Download the corresponding SQLite database
db_path = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="domyn/FINCH", 
    filename=f"text2sql-db/text2sql/bird/{sample['db_id']}.sqlite"
)

# Execute the SQL query on the actual database
conn = sqlite3.connect(db_path)
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute(sample['SQL'])
results = cursor.fetchall()
print(f"Query Results: {results}")

Alternative Method: Direct file download

import json
import sqlite3
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# Alternative: Load dataset JSON file directly
samples_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id="domyn/FINCH", filename="finch_dataset.json")
with open(samples_path, 'r') as f:
    dataset = json.load(f)

sample = dataset[0]  # First sample
print(f"Question: {sample['question']}")
print(f"SQL: {sample['SQL']}")

Financial Query Examples

# Analyze banking transactions
cursor.execute("""
    SELECT account_id, SUM(amount) as total_balance 
    FROM transactions 
    WHERE transaction_date >= '2023-01-01' 
    GROUP BY account_id 
    ORDER BY total_balance DESC
""")

# Insurance claims analysis
cursor.execute("""
    SELECT policy_type, COUNT(*) as claim_count, AVG(claim_amount)
    FROM claims c
    JOIN policies p ON c.policy_id = p.policy_id
    WHERE claim_status = 'approved'
    GROUP BY policy_type
""")

Schema Exploration

# Get all tables
cursor.execute("SELECT name FROM sqlite_master WHERE type='table'")
tables = cursor.fetchall()
print("Available tables:", tables)

# Get detailed schema information
cursor.execute("PRAGMA table_info(transactions)")
schema = cursor.fetchall()
for column in schema:
    print(f"Column: {column[1]}, Type: {column[2]}")

Data Quality & Statistics

Database Statistics

📊 TOTAL DATABASES: 33
📅 FINANCIAL DOMAINS: 8+ specialized areas
🏢 TABLES: 292 across all databases
🔗 RELATIONS: 177 foreign key relationships
💼 NL-SQL PAIRS: 75,725 total examples

Source	Database Count	Table Count	NL-SQL Pairs	Domain Focus
Spider (financial)	22	145	1,100	Cross-domain financial
BIRD (financial)	7	48	1,139	Large-scale realistic
BULL/CCKS	3	99	4,966	Chinese financial markets
BookSQL	1	185	68,907	Accounting systems
TOTAL	33	292	75,725	Financial

Difficulty Distribution

• Easy queries: 9,358 examples (12.4%)
• Medium queries: 33,780 examples (44.6%)
• Hard queries: 32,587 examples (43.0%)

Quality Assurance

The dataset has undergone extensive validation and cleaning:

• ✅ SQL execution verified for all 75,725 queries
• ✅ Schema consistency maintained across all databases
• ✅ Error correction performed on original datasets:
  • BIRD: 327 queries fixed (column names, table references)
  • BULL: 60 queries corrected (syntax errors, invalid references)
  • BookSQL: 9,526 queries repaired (column names, table references, syntax)
• ✅ Financial domain relevance verified for all included databases

Applications

This dataset is specifically designed for:

Financial Research Applications

• Financial Text-to-SQL Systems: Train models specifically for financial database querying
• Domain Adaptation Studies: Research cross-domain transfer from general to financial SQL
• Financial Schema Understanding: Develop models that understand complex financial relationships
• Regulatory Compliance: Build systems for automated financial reporting and compliance checking
• Risk Analysis Automation: Create tools for automated risk assessment query generation

Industry Applications

• Financial Analytics Platforms: Natural language interfaces for financial data analysis
• Banking Query Systems: Customer service and internal analyst tools
• Investment Research: Automated portfolio analysis and market research
• Regulatory Reporting: Compliance and audit report generation
• Insurance Processing: Claims analysis and policy management systems

Educational Applications

• Financial SQL Training: Teach SQL with realistic financial datasets
• Business Intelligence Education: Train on real-world financial database structures
• Fintech Development: Build and test financial technology applications

FINCH Evaluation Metric

The dataset introduces the FINCH Score, a specialized evaluation metric for financial Text-to-SQL that addresses limitations of traditional exact-match and execution accuracy metrics:

Key Features of FINCH Score

• Component-wise Scoring: Weighted evaluation of SQL clauses (SELECT, WHERE, JOIN, etc.)
• Financial Clause Priority: Higher weights for business-critical clauses (WHERE, JOIN, GROUP BY)
• Execution Tolerance: Materiality-aware tolerance for floating-point differences
• Structural Fidelity: Emphasis on semantic correctness over syntactic matching

Mathematical Formulation

FINCH Score = S(q̂,q*)^β × (δ + (1-δ)e(q̂,q*))

Where:

• S(q̂,q*): Weighted component similarity score
• e(q̂,q*): Execution accuracy with tolerance τ
• β: Structural fidelity parameter
• δ: Execution failure penalty parameter

Benchmark Results

Initial benchmarking on FINCH reveals detailed performance across multiple state-of-the-art models:

Model Performance Table

Model	Exact Match	Execution Accuracy	Component Match	FINCH Score
GPT-OSS-120B	1.8%	27.8%	16.6%	11.6%
Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B	0.6%	2.3%	3.7%	1.5%
Qwen3-235B-A22B	0.7%	2.5%	2.8%	1.2%
Qwen3-8B	0.5%	0.8%	3.5%	1.2%
GPT-OSS-20B	0.3%	7.5%	5.2%	3.0%
Phi-4-mini-reasoning	0.0%	0.2%	1.0%	0.4%

SQL Clause-Level Performance

Analysis of errors by SQL clause reveals systematic challenges:

Model	SELECT	FROM	WHERE	GROUP BY	HAVING	ORDER BY	LIMIT
GPT-OSS-120B	4.7%	27.3%	6.9%	7.5%	6.3%	6.3%	73.8%
Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B	2.5%	3.6%	0.7%	4.7%	1.0%	1.3%	42.7%
GPT-OSS-20B	1.4%	6.2%	1.5%	8.4%	3.7%	1.5%	65.2%

Model Performance Hierarchy

1. GPT-OSS-120B: Strongest overall performance (11.6% FINCH Score)
2. Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B: Best domain-adapted model despite smaller size (1.5% FINCH Score)
3. GPT-OSS-20B: Solid medium-scale performance (3.0% FINCH Score)

Key Research Findings

• Domain adaptation outperforms scale alone - Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B (7B params) rivals much larger models
• Schema-sensitive clauses (SELECT, FROM, WHERE) remain the primary bottleneck
• Query difficulty shows steep performance degradation: easy queries achieve ~26.5% vs hard queries at ~4.5%
• Financial complexity significantly impacts all models, with even SOTA systems achieving modest absolute performance
• FINCH Score correlation: Provides more nuanced assessment than traditional exact-match metrics

Data Source & Methodology

FINCH consolidates financial databases from multiple sources:

1. Careful Domain Selection: Only financial-relevant databases retained
2. Comprehensive Validation: All SQL queries tested for execution
3. Error Correction: Systematic fixing of syntax and schema errors
4. Difficulty Annotation: Query complexity labeled following established guidelines
5. Schema Normalization: All databases converted to SQLite for consistency

The curation process prioritized financial domain relevance while maintaining the diversity and complexity necessary for robust model evaluation.

Ethical Considerations

• Public Domain Data: All source databases are from publicly available benchmarks
• Financial Privacy: No real customer or proprietary financial data included
• Synthetic Data: Financial amounts and transactions are synthetic or anonymized
• Research Purpose: Intended primarily for academic and research applications
• Domain Compliance: Respects financial data handling best practices

Citation

If you use the FINCH dataset in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{singh2025finch,
  title={FINCH: Financial Intelligence using Natural language for Contextualized SQL Handling},
  author={Singh, Avinash Kumar and Sarmah, Bhaskarjit and Pasquali, Stefano},
  booktitle={Proceedings of Advances in Financial AI: Innovations, Risk, and Responsibility in the Era of LLMs (CIKM 2025)},
  year={2025},
  organization={ACM}
}

Dataset Card Contact

For questions about the FINCH dataset, please contact the research team at Domyn.

Research Team:

• Avinash Kumar Singh ([email protected])
• Bhaskarjit Sarmah ([email protected])
• Stefano Pasquali ([email protected])