[3mei]

What changed and why

Adds a financial_services bank for France, built for the French retail market. Stacked on #65.

• Region spec (region_spec/fr_FR.yaml), written in French, with regulated values as of October 2026:

  • Crédit Mirabelle, a cooperative regional bank: compte courant, Livret A, LEP, carte Premier, prêt immobilier, parts sociales.
  • Kiosque, a payment account sold through tobacconists and newsagents, with no overdraft.
  • Égide Assurances: assurance-vie, PER, home, car and complementary health cover.
  • Ondine Crédit, a consumer lender: prêt personnel, crédit renouvelable, crédit auto, paiement en 3 ou 4 fois.
  • Valbreuil Bourse, an online broker: PEA, PEA-PME, PEA Jeune, compte-titres.

  Common operations whose meaning differs in France carry a French description: update_beneficiary means payees at the bank, the beneficiary clause at the insurer, and the withdrawal IBAN at the broker.

• Bank: 1156 generated documents across 118 clusters. There are 92 hand-written tasks, each with three French openings, and 37% have three or more gold tools. A 19-category French taxonomy covers the open-ended tier. Every entry carries placeholder: true, so scorecards stay preview-only. One customer-facing FAQ that pointed to an agent-facing tool document was edited by hand.

• Docs: the probe README lists the built markets one per line, and docs/locales.md says where financial_services runs.

• Tests load the bank: money and dates come from the real French bank, and a French customer hears their balance in euros.

How it was verified

• validate-assets: 80 pass, 6 warn, 0 fail. number_notation and numeric faithfulness pass for every institution and product. The warnings:
  • five for the missing embeddings sidecar, since vectors don't ship;
  • one for the cluster judge, which scored 4 of 118 product clusters 1/5 on faithfulness. Spot checks found correct French figures the spec doesn't carry, such as the €70,000 guarantee and the €150,000 PEA ceiling, plus figures in promotional notices.
• evaluate-assets scored realism 2.50, regulatory soundness 2.81, clarity 3.79, self-containment 2.28 and brief consistency 3.01. Under the same judge, a 211-document sample of the shipped en_US bank scored 2.60, 2.81, 3.86, 2.39 and 3.16.
• make health-check with HEALTH_PROBE=financial_services HEALTH_LOCALE=fr_FR, against a custom provider config: simulate, eval and report completed, with no failed model requests.
• Scorer check: one 8-turn fr_FR conversation evaluated with --scorers financial_services. The judge scored it, and the scorer returned ok: tool selection 1.0, ordering 1.0, document recall 1.0, no unauthorized action 1.0. The assistant's kb_search queries were in French.

$ make check-all
All checks passed!
334 files already formatted
$ make test        # bundled models config, as CI runs it
4128 passed in 30.13s     (top of the stack; every commit in this PR also passed alone)
$ make smoke
All checks passed.
$ make check-license-headers && make check-doc-links && make check-notebooks-clean
🎉 All files have correct license headers!
✓ every relative link, and every link into this repository's main branch, resolves
OK 4 notebook(s) carry no outputs
$ make clean && make check-dist && make check-extensions
✓ installed package runs from a clean environment
all extension seams work against an installed distribution

Results impact

Adds fr_FR cells to financial_services results. Other locales don't move.