Cross-Lingual Reusability of LLM Pipelines: Financial Extraction, Multilingual Reasoning, and Semantic Screening

Abstract

Financial institutions increasingly deploy large language models (LLMs) in multilingual markets, raising a practical question: can pipelines developed and validated in English be reused across languages, or must they be rebuilt per locale? We test cross-lingual reusability along three dimensions--accuracy, reasoning-effort transfer, and behavioural stability--through three complementary tasks. Task 1 (cheque extraction) and Task 2 (Mintaka QA with pinned evidence across nine languages and nine model-effort configurations) test whether accuracy and effort settings transfer; Task 3 (FinanceBench pilot, 50 items over SEC 10-K filings in four languages) validates whether these patterns generalise to financial content. Accuracy reusability is broadly confirmed: Gemini 3.5 Flash achieves 95.2-97.6% extraction accuracy across prompt languages, and FinanceBench per-language means span 5.8pp (77.1-82.9%), though the language-difficulty ranking reverses between domains (Hindi is worst on Mintaka, best on FinanceBench at 82.9%). Effort reusability is domain-dependent: higher reasoning effort yields marginal gains on general-knowledge QA but up to 8pp on financial content, and effort configurations that help in English help proportionally in other languages. Behavioural reusability holds: citation-set overlap with English averages 77-79% Jaccard, with no single language consistently worse. Together, these results support qualified reuse of English-built pipelines, but per-domain, per-language validation remains necessary--neither semantic similarity nor self-reported confidence reliably predicts cross-lingual accuracy.