The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) revealed its partnership with Nvidia to enhance and expand its sovereign AI model capabilities designed specifically for India's payment system.

The program will cater to the changing needs of extensive, instantaneous payment systems, focusing on trust, resilience, security, and enabling the ecosystem, NPCI.

The partnership combines NPCI's knowledge in developing and managing large-scale payment systems with Nvidia's cutting-edge AI and high-performance computing technologies.

In this engagement, NPCI will utilize Nvidia Nemotron - a set of open models featuring open weights, training data, and methodologies - to develop a payments-oriented AI foundation model that complies with India's regulatory and data sovereignty standards.

NPCI's application of AI has been shaped by the practical demands arising from managing payment systems on a large scale.

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In this context, NPCI has launched the UPI Help Assistant as a pilot project, backed by FiMI (Financial Model for India) which features a refined and pre-trained Small Language Model (SLM) created specifically for the payment ecosystem. The assistant aids in addressing grievances for UPI users by facilitating quicker and more uniform responses on a larger scale.

In the subsequent stage of its AI development, NPCI intends to transition from specialized use-case agents to a fundamental, scalable AI framework for the payment ecosystem.

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Vishal Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer, NPCI says, "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".

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"India has one of the most advanced digital payment systems in the world that operates at population scale where trust, resilience, and performance are fundamental," says Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Asia South, Nvidia.