NPCI accelerates with advanced Sovereign AI Infrastructure for Digital Payments with NVIDIA
New Delhi: National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has declared to advance collaboration with NVIDIA to accelerate its sovereign AI model capabilities which is purpose-built for India’s payments ecosystem. This initiative would enhance a suitable evolution and requirements of large-scale, real-time payment systems, with a strong emphasis on trust, resilience, security, and ecosystem enablement. The collaboration is touted with NPCI’s deep dimension of expertise in building and operating population with scale payments infrastructure with NVIDIA’s advanced AI and accelerated computing platforms. Through this engagement, NPCI will use NVIDIA Nemotron, which is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes in its model development journey that creates payments-native AI foundation model in line with the India’s regulatory sovereign requirements.
The use of artificial intelligence in NPCI has been guided by practical requirements emerging from operating payment systems at scale.
Recently, the NPCI has introduced the UPI Help Assistant as a pilot initiative backed by FiMI (Financial Model for India) fine-tuned and pre-trained Small Language Model (SLM) developed specifically for the payment ecosystem. This helping initiative would aid and provide a suitable resolution for UPI users by enabling more timely and impressive responses at scale.
In the next step of this AI journey, NPCI will be evolving from specific agents to a foundational, scalable AI layer for the payment ecosystem.
This proposed model will explore architectures such as Mixture of Experts (MoE) to support high-volume, low-latency payment environments, while gradually expanding capabilities across multilingual datasets and agent-optimised systems.
Over time, the initiative is expected to support innovation across areas such as trust frameworks, grievance redressal processes, and operational intelligence. It is also intended to provide a platform that can be leveraged by banks, fin-techs, and other participants in the payment ecosystem, while maintaining a strong focus on data security, sovereignty, and responsible use of AI.