Are LLMs Good for Ad-hoc Reporting on Financial Data?

October 28, 2025

Report writing software tools generally end up being used not by end-users but by IT support staff. LLMs offer the potential of direct and ease of use by business users themselves. In this post, I use an LLM to connect and query the Actrix database of financial institutions reports.

Introduction

Ever since I have worked in Software technology, vendors have offered the compelling vision of business users creating their own ad-hoc reports, as and when they need.

Great progress has been made towards this goal, with seminal products such as Business Objects and Power Builder gaining widespread adoption as excellent report writing tools.

However, in large enterprises, these report writing tools end up being used not by business users but by IT support staff.

That is not surprising, when you consider that to create reports, a user needs to understand the data and it’s structure. The time taken to get and maintain that knowledge, is not generally worth a user’s time.

LLMs with their natural language interface, ability to write code (SQL, python), figure out database schemas and utilise business concepts, offer the possibility of finally delivering ad-hoc reporting capability directly guided by a business user.

Background – Bank Data

I have written a number of blogs covering the Financial Statements of U.S. Bank Holding Companies:

In each of these I used ActrixFT Dashboards to query our database of U.S. Bank Holding Company Financial Reports.

Dashboards by definition, present a curated, easy to use UX for business users to view charts and summary data. While they can also provide querying, filtering and slicing/dicing data, they are limited by the ideas and design of the person/team that built the Dashboard.

For ad-hoc reporting, we now have a better way.

ActrixFT Connector

Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to externals systems (such as data sources), we have created an ActrixFT Connector.

This means that direct from an LLM ChatApp, a business user can directly query and create ad-hoc reports for U.S. Bank Holding Company Data.

Let’s see how to do this using the Anthropic Claude Desktop App, which I have configured with the ActrixFT Connector.

Getting Started

When starting a task, we are often faced with the blank page problem and it is very helpful to have an example. So I can start by just entering:

Show me some sample data on bank holding companies.

The progress/thinking steps in the console then show:

Nice.

Once these had run through to completion, I got:

Explaining clearly the institutions, report types, dates and an example.

Ad-hoc Report

As a business user, I am familiar with and have knowledge of the typical information contained in Financial Statements of Banks, so I can simply enter:

Check the FRY9C report for every institution with a report for 2025-06-30, list institutions in order of decreasing Tier 1 Capital Ratio and update with columns for each of the past 4 quarters

This then produced the following:

For the full report, see here.

This closes with a nice summary:

Ad-hoc Queries

Next, I tried the following:

Lets turn next to Net Income in the Consolidated Income Statement, can you find out if any institution reported a loss in the last quarter?

A decent example of an ad-hoc query that would require a lot of lookup and time if I had to check each report.

And, after some back and forth and prompts from me e.g. “CapitalOne acquired Discover in Q2 2025”:

Which showcases back and forth exploration of note-worthy numbers.

Complex Report

How about report that requires operations on more than one underlying metric; a more complex ask.

Calculate the ratio of Net Income YTD over Total Capital and rank by decreasing ratio all the banks

Which returned:

For the full report on Total Capital Analysis click here.

From this, the Notable Observations show:

Thoughts

That was all pretty easy.

I typed in natural language text, much as I would do in an email to IT support, who could then build the report and make it available to me.

Hopefully in a timeframe for me to still need it or remember why I asked for it!

But there are no guarantees on that.

Now with an LLM, I as a business user, can do it myself.

As and when I want.

Leaving only the more complex and interesting work to my IT support team.

A win-win for us both.

In Summary

Question: Are report writers like Business Objects and Power Builder used by end-users to create new ad-hoc reports?
Answer: In most enterprises, end-users do not create new or ad-hoc reports themselves, instead they rely on IT support staff to do that for them, primarily due to the knowledge requirements of database content and structure.

Question: Are LLMs good for ad-hoc queries and reports on databases?
Answer: LLMs with Connectors are great at creating adhoc reports. Firstly as business users can simply chat with them and secondly due to their ability to write code (e.g. SQL or python), access database schemas and utilise business language.

Question: How can I use an LLM to access Financial Statements and Regulatory reports of US Banks or Financial Institutions ?
Answer: Configure the ActrixFT Connector with Claude or your preferred LLM. Just contact us to find out how and then you are ready to chat away, query the data and build reports.

Amir Khwaja

Banks