AI-Driven Financial Studies: Market Intelligence, Risk Management, and Governance

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue welcomes original research papers, comprehensive reviews, and methodological contributions at the intersection of artificial intelligence and finance. We seek papers that advance both theoretical understanding and practical implementation across the following interconnected themes:

Theme 1: Generative AI and Large Language Models in Finance

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Document analysis and automation: Contract review, regulatory filing analysis, earnings call transcription and summarization, financial report generation.
• Market intelligence: Sentiment extraction from news and social media, automated research report generation, real-time event detection.
• Trading and investment: LLM-generated trading signals, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for investment research, prompt engineering for financial tasks.
• Risk assessment: Credit analysis using unstructured data, synthetic scenario generation for stress testing, automated risk reporting.
• Customer service: Conversational AI for financial advisory, personalized recommendation systems, financial literacy education.
• Challenges: Hallucination detection and mitigation, domain-specific fine-tuning, multimodal financial data processing, computational efficiency, model validation.

Theme 2: Explainable AI for Financial Decision-Making

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Regulatory compliance: Meeting EU AI Act requirements, ECOA compliance for credit decisions, explainability standards for high-risk systems.
• XAI methodologies: SHAP, LIME, counterfactual explanations, attention mechanisms, causal inference approaches.
• Applications: Credit scoring transparency, algorithmic trading interpretability, portfolio allocation explanations, insurance underwriting decisions.
• Evaluation: Measuring explanation quality, cognitive load studies, stakeholder-specific explanations (consumers, regulators, executives).
• Trade-offs: Balancing model performance with interpretability, computational costs, protecting proprietary models while satisfying transparency requirements.

Theme 3: AI Governance, Ethics, and Fairness in Finance

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Algorithmic bias: Detection and mitigation in lending algorithms, less discriminatory alternatives (LDAs), fairness metrics (group vs. individual fairness).
• Regulatory frameworks: EU AI Act implementation, cross-border harmonization, regulatory sandboxes, supervisory technology.
• Responsible AI practices: Model governance, bias testing protocols, human oversight mechanisms, incident response procedures.
• Data ethics: Privacy-preserving machine learning, federated learning across institutions, consent and data rights.
• Social impact: Financial inclusion, workforce displacement, digital divide, access to AI benefits.

Theme 4: Advanced AI Methods Across Financial Domains

Financial Markets:

• High-frequency trading with reinforcement learning.
• Market manipulation detection using graph neural networks.
• Liquidity prediction and price discovery with deep learning.
• Volatility forecasting using hybrid models.

Asset Pricing and Portfolio Management:

• Alternative data integration in factor models.
• Deep reinforcement learning for dynamic portfolio optimization.
• Risk-return trade-offs with neural networks.
• ESG-aligned portfolio construction using AI.

Derivatives:

• Neural network-based options pricing and calibration.
• Deep hedging strategies with transaction costs.
• Volatility surface modeling with machine learning.
• Exotic derivatives valuation using generative models.

Corporate Finance:

• Bankruptcy and financial distress prediction (99%+ accuracy models).
• M&A target identification and due diligence automation.
• Credit risk assessment with alternative data.
• Corporate governance analysis using NLP.

Banking Systems:

• Fraud detection with transformers and RAG.
• AI-enhanced credit scoring with alternative data.
• AML/KYC automation and network analysis.
• Digital banking and conversational AI.

Financial Regulation (RegTech):

• Automated regulatory compliance monitoring.
• Systemic risk assessment and stress testing.
• Climate risk and ESG compliance reporting.
• Real-time transaction monitoring.

Theme 5: Emerging and Frontier Technologies

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Quantum machine learning: Portfolio optimization, fraud detection, risk management applications.
• Synthetic data generation: Privacy-preserving model training, stress testing with rare events, GAN and VAE approaches.
• Federated learning: Cross-institutional collaboration without data sharing.
• Multimodal AI: Combining text, time series, images, and structured data.
• Neuromorphic computing: Energy-efficient AI for real-time financial applications.

We welcome your submissions and look forward to your contributions to this important and timely topic.

Dr. Saurabh Ahluwalia
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Financial Studies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• artificial intelligence in finance
• algorithmic trading
• financial risk management
• RegTech
• credit scoring
• portfolio optimization
• AI governance
• market intelligence