PRISM: Prompt-Refined In-Context System Modelling for Financial Retrieval

With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), financial information retrieval has become a critical industrial application. Extracting task-relevant information from lengthy financial filings is essential for both operational and analytical decision-making. We present PRISM, a training-free framework that integrates refined system prompting, in-context learning (ICL), and lightweight multi-agent coordination for document and chunk ranking tasks. Our primary contribution is a systematic empirical study of when each component provides value: prompt engineering delivers consistent performance with minimal overhead, ICL enhances reasoning for complex queries when applied selectively, and multi-agent systems show potential primarily with larger models and careful architectural design. Extensive ablation studies across FinAgentBench, FiQA-2018, and FinanceBench reveal that simpler configurations often outperform complex multi-agent pipelines, providing practical guidance for practitioners. Our best configuration achieves an NDCG@5 of 0.71818 on FinAgentBench, ranking third while being the only training-free approach in the top three. We provide comprehensive feasibility analyses covering latency, token usage, and cost trade-offs to support deployment decisions. The source code is released at https://bit.ly/prism-ailens.