NPCI Advances India’s Sovereign AI Infrastructure for Digital Payments with NVIDIA

NEW DELHI:
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) today announced its collaboration with NVIDIA to scale and advance its sovereign AI model capabilities purpose-built for India’s payments ecosystem. The initiative will support the evolving requirements of large-scale, real-time payment systems, with an emphasis on trust, resilience, security, and ecosystem enablement.

The collaboration brings together NPCI’s deep domain expertise in building and operating population-scale payments infrastructure with NVIDIA’s advanced AI and accelerated computing platforms. As part of this engagement, NPCI will use NVIDIA Nemotron – a family of open models with open weights, training data and recipes – in its model development journey to create a payments-native AI foundation model aligned with India’s regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.

NPCI’s use of AI has been guided by practical requirements emerging from operating payment systems at scale. In this context, NPCI recently introduced the UPI Help Assistant as a pilot initiative, supported by FiMI (Financial Model for India) fine-tuned and pre-trained Small Language Model (SLM) developed specifically for the payment ecosystem. The assistant supports grievance resolution for UPI users by enabling more timely and consistent responses at scale. As part of the next phase of its AI journey, NPCI aims to evolve from use-case–specific agents to a foundational, scalable AI layer for the payment ecosystem. The 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, fintechs, and other participants in the payment ecosystem, while maintaining a strong focus on data security, sovereignty, and responsible use of AI.

Vishal Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer, NPCI, said “Through this collaboration with NVIDIA, NPCI aims to advance AI capabilities designed specifically for India’s payments ecosystem. Drawing from our experience of operating population-scale, real-time payment systems, this initiative is designed to create a sovereign, payments-native AI foundation that strengthens trust, resilience, and security, while remaining aligned with India’s regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. As we evolve from use-case–led AI deployments to a foundational and scalable AI layer, our focus remains on enabling the broader ecosystem to innovate responsibly through robust governance frameworks and secure, future-ready infrastructure.

“India has one of the most advanced digital payment systems in the world that operates at population scale where trust, resilience, and performance are fundamental,” said Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Asia South, NVIDIA. “With accelerated computing and AI, we aim to strengthen India’s fintech infrastructure while enabling responsible innovation across the ecosystem,” he added.

Through this collaboration, NPCI continues to focus on strengthening the underlying digital public infrastructure for payments, with a view to supporting long-term stability, efficiency, and innovation across the ecosystem.