The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has introduced FiMI — short for Finance Model for India — a domain-specific artificial intelligence language model tailored for the country’s rapidly expanding digital payments infrastructure.

The announcement was made at the India–AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi. Developed internally by NPCI, FiMI is already operating in production and powers the UPI Help Assistant, an AI-based support system for users of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Why FiMI Was Built

General-purpose large language models often struggle when applied to highly regulated, high-volume financial systems where precision and trust are essential. NPCI designed FiMI specifically to address the operational realities of India’s payments ecosystem.

The model is engineered to understand the complexities of UPI and related systems, including:

• Transaction dispute resolution

• Mandate lifecycle management

• Regulatory and ecosystem-related queries

• High-scale financial workflows

By focusing exclusively on payment-domain intelligence, FiMI aims to deliver reliable reasoning and consistent responses in real-world transaction environments.

Training and Technical Foundation

NPCI stated that FiMI underwent continuous pre-training and was further fine-tuned using Indian financial datasets along with synthetically generated payments data. This approach enables:

• Structured tool invocation

• Accurate contextual reasoning

• Robust multilingual capabilities

• High consistency in financial interactions

Its architecture is built to function effectively in high-volume national-scale deployments where operational reliability is non-negotiable.

NPCI has also published a detailed technical paper on the arXiv platform, outlining the model’s data preparation methods, training process, and evaluation results. This step reflects the institution’s emphasis on transparency and public digital infrastructure research.

Deployment Through the UPI Help Assistant

FiMI currently operates through NPCI’s UPI Help Assistant, launched as a pilot at national scale. The assistant uses an agentic AI framework capable of multi-step reasoning to:

• Address payment-related queries

• Assist with grievance redressal

• Support mandate management

The system presently supports English, Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali. Additional Indian languages are expected to be introduced within six to eight months to expand accessibility across regions.

Future Roadmap

NPCI is exploring advanced model architectures, including Mixture-of-Experts frameworks, to improve scalability and efficiency. Multilingual expansion remains a priority as part of efforts to enhance financial inclusion and user reach.

These initiatives are currently in research and experimentation phases and will be developed while maintaining strict governance, reliability, and compliance standards essential for national payment systems.

Institutional Context

NPCI operates as India’s umbrella organization for retail payments and settlement systems. It was established by the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks' Association. Structured as a not-for-profit entity, NPCI is responsible for developing and managing critical digital payment infrastructure used by millions daily.

Commenting on the development, Vishal Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer at NPCI, emphasized that FiMI represents a step toward building trustworthy, India-centric financial AI systems while promoting transparency and collaboration across the ecosystem.

What This Means for India’s Payments Landscape

With FiMI, NPCI is signaling a shift toward domain-specialized AI models designed for public digital infrastructure rather than relying solely on global general-purpose systems.

As digital payments continue to scale across India, purpose-built AI frameworks like FiMI may play a key role in enhancing user support, improving operational resilience, and strengthening trust in national financial networks.