India's National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has entered into a collaboration with US-based semiconductor company NVIDIA to scale its sovereign AI capabilities within the country's digital payments infrastructure. The engagement centres on the joint development of a payments-native AI foundation model built to comply with India's regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.
NPCI, which oversees retail payments and settlement systems in India, said the initiative forms part of its ongoing AI programme. The organisation will use NVIDIA Nemotron, a family of open models, datasets, and technologies designed to support agentic AI systems, as part of its model development work.
From domain-specific tools to foundational AI
The collaboration builds on NPCI's earlier work in applied AI. The organisation previously developed FiMI (Finance Model for India), a domain-specific language model created in-house to address the limitations of general-purpose large language models when deployed in high-scale payment workflows. FiMI currently powers NPCI's UPI Help Assistant, which supports grievance resolution for Unified Payments Interface (UPI) users.
The next phase shifts the focus from individual use-case agents to a broader foundational AI layer intended to serve the wider payment ecosystem. The proposed model will explore architectural approaches such as Mixture of Experts (MoE), which is suited to high-volume, low-latency environments characteristic of large-scale real-time payment networks. NPCI also plans to extend capabilities across multilingual datasets and agent-optimised systems.
Over time, the programme is expected to support trust frameworks, grievance redressal processes, and operational intelligence across the ecosystem. Notably, NPCI intends the resulting platform to be accessible to banks, fintechs, and other participants operating within India's payments infrastructure, while maintaining commitments to data security, sovereignty, and responsible AI governance.
NPCI's chief technology officer said the initiative is designed to create a sovereign, payments-native AI foundation that strengthens trust, resilience, and security, and that the organisation's focus remains on enabling the broader ecosystem to innovate responsibly through robust governance frameworks and future-ready infrastructure.
The announcement adds to a period of activity around NPCI's ecosystem development. Last month, fintech firm ZET received NPCI approval to operate as a third-party application provider (TPAP) within the UPI system.
The move reflects a broader pattern among national payments bodies seeking to develop AI infrastructure tailored to domestic regulatory environments, rather than relying on general-purpose commercial models. For a system such as UPI, the ability to build sovereign, domain-specific AI capabilities carries implications for resilience, compliance, and long-term operational control.
