NPCI and Nvidia work together to develop India's independent AI digital payment infrastructure
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday announced a collaboration with Nvidia to scale and advance sovereign AI model capabilities tailored specifically for India’s payments ecosystem.
NPCI said the initiative is aimed at supporting the growing needs of large-scale, real-time payment systems, with a focus on trust, resilience, security, and ecosystem-wide enablement. The partnership combines NPCI’s experience in running population-scale digital payments infrastructure with Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing platforms.
As part of the collaboration, NPCI will use Nvidia Nemotron — a family of open AI models with open weights, datasets, and training recipes — to build a payments-native AI foundation model aligned with India’s regulatory framework and data sovereignty requirements.
NPCI said its AI adoption strategy has been shaped by operational needs emerging from managing payment systems at national scale. It recently piloted a UPI Help Assistant powered by FiMI (Financial Model for India), a fine-tuned and pre-trained small language model designed for the payments domain. The assistant is intended to improve grievance resolution for UPI users by enabling faster and more consistent responses.
Going forward, NPCI plans to move beyond narrow use-case agents toward a broader, foundational AI layer that can serve the wider payments ecosystem.
NPCI chief technology officer Vishal Kanvaty said the partnership is designed to build a sovereign, payments-focused AI foundation that strengthens reliability and security while remaining compliant with Indian regulatory and data governance norms.
Vishal Dhupar, managing director for Asia South at Nvidia, said India operates one of the world’s most advanced population-scale digital payment systems and that accelerated computing and AI can further strengthen fintech infrastructure while enabling responsible innovation.
NPCI added that the collaboration aligns with its broader goal of reinforcing India’s digital public infrastructure for payments and supporting long-term efficiency, stability, and innovation across the ecosystem.
