NPCI Unveils ‘FiMI’, AI Model Built for India’s Digital Payments System

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Monday announced the launch of FiMI, a domain-specific artificial intelligence language model built for India’s digital payments ecosystem.

FiMI, short for Finance Model for India, was unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 and is designed to support high-volume, high-trust payment systems such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI). NPCI said the model has been developed in-house to address gaps seen when general-purpose AI models are applied to complex financial workflows.

The model currently powers NPCI’s UPI Help Assistant, an AI-based conversational support system launched as a pilot for UPI users. The assistant helps users with transaction queries, dispute resolution and mandate management. It supports English, Hindi, Telugu and Bengali, with additional Indian languages are expected to be added over the next six to eight months.

NPCI said FiMI has been trained to understand the specific requirements of Indian payment systems, including dispute handling, regulatory queries and mandate lifecycle processes. The model underwent continuous pre-training and fine-tuning using Indian financial data and synthetically generated payments data to improve accuracy and reliability in live transaction environments.

According to the organisation, the system is built to operate in high-scale settings where consistency and trust are critical. NPCI also released a technical paper on the arXiv platform detailing the model’s training methods, data curation and evaluation process.

Vishal Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer at NPCI, said the release reflects the organisation’s focus on building purpose-driven AI tools for financial infrastructure. “Having successfully built and validated the model, we are now sharing our technical learnings through a detailed paper to contribute to responsible innovation,” he said.

NPCI said it is exploring next-generation AI architectures, including Mixture-of-Experts models, and expanding multilingual capabilities as part of ongoing research efforts.

NPCI, established by the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks’ Association, operates key retail payment systems in the country, including UPI, RuPay and IMPS, and plays a central role in India’s digital payments infrastructure.