The National Payments Corporation of India is shifting towards small, task-specific AI models like FiMI to enhance security, compliance, and operational efficiency in the country’s digital payments ecosystem, reflecting a broader move towards deterministic AI in financial services.
India’s payments infrastructure is moving towards a more tightly controlled form of artificial intelligence, with the National Payments Corporation of India favouring smaller, task-specific models over broad systems that can improvise. That shift reflects a practical concern in financial services: when AI is used for live customer support, dispute handling and mandate management, vague or incorrect answers can create operational and regulatory risk.
According to NPCI, its in-house Finance Model for India, or FiMI, was built for that narrower purpose. The organisation said the model powers its UPI Help Assistant and is designed to deal with transaction disputes, mandate life-cycle management and regulatory queries in the country’s payments environment. Rather than acting like a general chatbot, FiMI is intended to understand the structure and rules of Indian payment systems, particularly UPI, so that responses remain consistent and auditable.
The approach fits a broader industry shift towards deterministic AI in sensitive financial workflows. Dilip Asbe, NPCI’s chief executive, has argued that payments firms gain more from models that are precise, bounded and tied to established processes than from open-ended systems that may generate ambiguous or fabricated answers. That is especially relevant in real-time consumer support, where institutions must balance speed with accuracy and legal certainty.
NPCI has said FiMI is already being used by more than one million users in functions such as automated mandate cancellations and transaction issue resolution. The model has also been described by other industry reports as having been trained and fine-tuned on Indian financial and synthetically generated payments data, with support for structured tool use and multiple languages. At the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Reserve Bank of India governor Sanjay Malhotra also highlighted new UPI features, including tap-and-pay on point-of-sale terminals and MyUPI, an AI-enabled customer support service powered by FiMI, underscoring how closely India’s payments policy and AI strategy are now being linked.
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