NPCI partners with Nvidia to build sovereign AI infra for payments

NPCI will use Nvidia's Nemotron open models to develop a sovereign, payments-focused AI foundation model aimed at enhancing trust, resilience and scalability across India's payments network

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday said it has partnered with United States (US)-based deeptech major Nvidia to scale its sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. 

 

The NPCI said it will utilise Nvidia’s Nemotron open models to develop a ‘payments-focused AI foundational model’ in alignment with India’s regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. 

 

This development comes after the introduction of the NPCI’s UPI Help Assistant, supported by FiMI (Financial Model for India) — a small language model (SLM) developed specifically for the payment ecosystem. The assistant streamlines grievance redressal for users of the real-time payments system.  

 

“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,” Vishal Kanvaty, chief technology officer (CTO), NPCI, said. 

   

“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 the mixture of experts to support high-volume, low-latency payment environments, while gradually expanding capabilities across multilingual datasets and agent-optimised systems,” the NPCI said in a statement. 

 

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

 

Nvidia’s Nemotron is a family of open models, datasets, and technologies used to build agentic AI systems that are designed for advanced reasoning, coding, visual understanding, agentic tasks, and information retrieval, among other things. 

 

The NPCI plans to provide a platform to banks, financial technology companies (fintechs), and payments-system participants that can provide workflows around grievance redressal processes and operational intelligence.