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National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) | MeitY
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has established a sovereign, payments-native AI layer for India’s digital finance ecosystem by launching the FiMI model and collaborating with NVIDIA.
FiMI (Financial Model for India) is an in-house developed domain-specific language model designed to handle high-trust payment workflows like dispute resolution and mandate management. To scale this capability, NPCI has partnered with NVIDIA to utilize the NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models and accelerated computing platforms. This transition from use-case-specific agents to a foundational AI layer aims to achieve population-scale resilience while strictly adhering to India’s data sovereignty and regulatory requirements. Currently powering the UPI Help Assistant in four languages (English, Hindi, Telugu, Bengali), the infrastructure is evolving toward a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to support low-latency, high-volume transactions across the entire banking and fintech ecosystem.
Key Pillars of NPCI’s Sovereign AI Infrastructure
FiMI (Financial Model for India): A domain-specific small language model (SLM) fine-tuned on Indian financial data for accurate reasoning in payment disputes.
NVIDIA Collaboration: Leveraging accelerated computing and the Nemotron open-model family to build a payments-native foundation model.
Agentic AI Framework: Powering conversational support for UPI users with multi-step reasoning for grievance redressal and mandate management.
Sovereign Data Security: Ensuring that AI training and deployment pipelines remain aligned with national regulatory frameworks and data sovereignty.
Ecosystem Enablement: Providing a scalable AI platform that can be leveraged by banks and fintechs to strengthen trust and operational intelligence.
What is the “FiMI” Model? FiMI (Financial Model for India) is a payments-native AI language model developed in-house by NPCI to address the limitations of general-purpose LLMs in high-trust financial environments. Built specifically for the complexity of the Indian ecosystem (like UPI), FiMI understands transaction dispute lifecycles and regulatory nuances. It has been pre-trained and fine-tuned on a mix of real-world Indian financial data and synthetically generated payments data. This allows it to operate with the precision and consistency required for national-scale payment systems, where even minor reasoning errors can lead to significant financial or trust-based fallout.
What is Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in Payments? Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is an AI architecture that replaces a single monolithic model with multiple specialised “experts,” activated selectively through a routing system. In NPCI’s sovereign infrastructure, this functions like a high-speed digital sorting office: when transaction data enters, a gating network analyses it and triggers only the most relevant experts—such as one for UPI dispute logic or another for multilingual query handling—rather than the entire model. This conditional computation preserves low latency while enabling massive scale. For sovereign fintech, MoE allows NPCI to support over a billion daily transactions without proportionally increasing compute costs, while embedding domain-specific financial intelligence essential for secure, high-stakes national payment systems.
Policy Relevance
NPCI’s move represents a transition from “AI Adoption” to “Sovereign AI Ownership,” where India’s payment backbone no longer relies on black-box global models for critical financial reasoning.
Strategic Impact:
Bypassing Global Model Bias: By developing FiMI, NPCI avoids the “Model Drift” and linguistic exclusion often found in Western-centric LLMs, directly supporting the SabhaSaar goal of 14-language inclusion.
Standardizing “Techno-Legal” Trust: Utilizing NVIDIA Nemotron—an open-weight model family—acts as a “Standard Maker” move, allowing for the “Audit-Ready” transparency required by the IndiaAI Safety Institute.
Operationalizing Grievance Redressal: Scaling the UPI Help Assistant via an MoE architecture can help states achieve the 6-day disposal model for financial grievances identified in the NeSDA Way Forward.
Federal Fintech Arbitrage: Providing a “Sovereign AI Layer” allows smaller cooperative banks and fintechs to bypass high compute costs, effectively utilizing the 20,000 new GPUs for regional financial inclusion.
Implementation Fidelity via Net-Zero: Leveraging NVIDIA’s energy-efficient computing supports India’s 51% clean energy goals by reducing the power density required for high-volume transaction monitoring.
Relevant Question for Policy Stakeholders: How should NPCI and MeitY collaborate to ensure that the FiMI benchmarks are used to set accuracy standards for all AI-led banking assistants in the IndiaAI Mission?
Follow the full news here: NPCI Advances India’s Sovereign AI Infrastructure for Digital Payments with NVIDIA
NPCI announces FiMI, a domain-specific AI language Model built for India’s payments ecosystem