Are Foundation Models Useful for Bankruptcy Prediction?

Abstract: Foundation models have shown promise across various financial applications, yet their effectiveness for corporate bankruptcy prediction remains systematically unevaluated against established methods. We study bankruptcy forecasting using Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and TabPFN, evaluated on large, highly imbalanced datasets of over one million company records from the Visegrád Group. We provide the first systematic comparison of foundation models against classical machine learning baselines for this task. Our results show that models such as XGBoost and CatBoost consistently outperform foundation models across all prediction horizons. LLM-based approaches suffer from unreliable probability estimates, undermining their use in risk-sensitive financial settings. TabPFN, while competitive with simpler baselines, requires substantial computational resources with costs not justified by performance gains. These findings suggest that, despite their generality, current foundation models remain less effective than specialized methods for bankruptcy forecasting.