The National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the widely used payment platform UPI, will use an artificial intelligence model developed by Nvidia Corp. to create a payments-native AI foundation model aligned with India's regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. The initiative will support the evolving requirements of large-scale, real-time payment systems, with an emphasis on trust, resilience, security, and ecosystem enablement, a statement said on Wednesday.
"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," NPCI said.
The company will use Nvidia Nemotro — a family of open models, datasets, and technologies used to build efficient, accurate, and specialised agentic AI systems. Designed for advanced reasoning, coding, visual understanding, agentic tasks, safety, speech, and information retrieval, Nemotron models are openly available and integrated across the AI ecosystem so they can be deployed anywhere—from edge to cloud, according to Nvidia website.
"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," said Vishal Kanvaty, chief technology officer of NPCI.
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Expanding UPI Capabilities
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.
The UPI is the dominant payment method in India, with nearly 50 crore active users facilitating 16–21 billion monthly transactions, as per reports. It accounts for over 80% of digital retail payments, with 65% of users transacting multiple times daily.
"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," the company said.
The use of Nvidia system 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, NPCI said.
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