NPCI chief Asbe bats for regulatory framework for fintech AI ecosystem

NPCI has called for a regulatory framework for agentic AI in digital payments while expanding AI-driven UPI and voice-payment use cases

India’s digital payments and financial technology ecosystem needs a regulatory framework for the agentic world, to ensure orderly implementation of related use cases, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) Chief Dilip Asbe said on Friday.

 

He called for room to experiment with newer technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) in the country, while placing emphasis on ensuring governance frameworks around how transactions are authorised, and grievances are addressed.

 

“We must have a regulatory framework for the agentic (world) and once that's there, we can look at the orderly kind of implementation of use cases. As a country, we must have an open mind and allow some experimentation, the creation of use cases using the agentic (technologies) because it creates a leverage for the user and merchant,” Asbe said.

 

He was speaking at the Mumbai Tech Week 2026.

 

NPCI operates India’s real-time payments system Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in the country.

 

Flagship models

 

His call for a regulatory framework comes at a time when NPCI is working on agentic use cases including agent-to-agent communication between banks and the apex retail payments body, and its flagship Finance Model for India (FiMI), among other things.

 

“We must ensure that we have risks well protected and indicated. In that process, what could be the transaction amount, which are the transactions where a user is giving an instruction back to the agent, and from a governance perspective how it is recorded; whether it is human not-in-a-loop, a consenting human or a human authorising the transaction,” he explained.

 

The governance frameworks could indicate how policies are recorded and validated before transactions, and how evidence is generated to address user grievances.

 

For FiMI, Asbe said that the small language model was built in-house and records a traction of 1 million users every month. This, he said, could reach 1 million users on a daily basis in the next few months, indicating rapid adoption by UPI users.

 

“We see about 8 lakh to 9 lakh mandates being cancelled and that is all without any publicity. We have picked up the first use case of UPI Help and that is the first one to drive in the market. But I am very sure that between NPCI, banks and the ecosystem, we will start seeing multiple such use cases that are sharp, specific, tool-driven use cases for FiMI,” he said.

 

FiMI has been rolled out as an NPCI UPI Help Assistant this year, which acts as an AI-powered conversational support system. The assistant supports Indian languages such as Hindi, Telugu and Bengali along with English, among others.

 

Voice and UPI

 

NPCI is currently working to ensure that accuracy of its voice-based payments feature Hello UPI grows from its current levels even as adoption is yet to take off.

 

“We work with Sarvam and some other players to provide the voice-based Hello UPI, but it's yet to take off and we are in the process of identifying the right use case. The accuracy levels are 95 per cent and we want to go back to 98 to 99 per cent,” he said.

 

The conversation payments feature allows users to process transactions using voice commands.