The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on February 18, 2026, notified regarding the collaborating with NVIDIA to Build Sovereign AI for India’s Payments Ecosystem.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to scale and enhance its sovereign AI capabilities tailored for India’s payments ecosystem. The initiative aims to support large-scale, real-time payment systems with a strong focus on trust, resilience, security, and ecosystem growth.
Under this partnership, NPCI will combine its expertise in managing population-scale payment infrastructure with NVIDIA’s advanced AI and accelerated computing platforms. NPCI will leverage NVIDIA Nemotron—an open family of AI models—to develop a payments-native AI foundation model aligned with India’s regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.
NPCI has already piloted AI-driven solutions such as the UPI Help Assistant, powered by FiMI (Financial Model for India), a fine-tuned Small Language Model (SLM) designed for the payments ecosystem. The assistant enhances grievance redressal for UPI users by enabling faster and more consistent responses.
Moving forward, NPCI plans to transition from use-case-specific AI tools to a scalable foundational AI layer for the payments ecosystem. The proposed model may adopt advanced architectures like Mixture of Experts (MoE) to manage high-volume, low-latency payment environments and expand multilingual and agent-based capabilities.
In the long term, the initiative is expected to drive innovation in trust frameworks, grievance mechanisms, and operational intelligence, while offering a secure and sovereign AI platform for banks, fintechs, and other ecosystem participants.
