NPCI introduces AI assistant for real-time UPI payment queries
What's the story
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has launched FiMI (Finance Model for India), an artificial intelligence language model tailored for India's digital payments ecosystem. The announcement was made at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. NPCI said that the in-house developed model is designed to understand payment-related workflows, including Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions, dispute handling, mandate management and regulatory queries.
AI integration
FiMI powers NPCI's UPI Help Assistant
FiMI currently powers NPCI's UPI Help Assistant, an AI-based conversational support system for UPI users. The assistant uses an agent-based AI framework to answer payment-related queries, assist with grievance redressal and support mandate lifecycle management. It now supports English, Hindi, Telugu and Bengali languages with plans to add more Indian languages in the next six to eight months.
User experience
AI tools could transform payment systems
The introduction of AI tools in payment systems could change how people handle transaction issues, track mandates, and get help for digital payment queries. Automated assistance could help users deal with disputes or failed transactions faster, especially as UPI volumes keep increasing. NPCI said that FiMI was pre-trained and fine-tuned using Indian financial and synthetically generated payments data to improve its accuracy in high-volume transaction environments.
Expansion strategy
NPCI publishes technical paper on FiMI
NPCI has published a technical paper on the open-access research platform arXiv, detailing FiMI's training process and evaluation framework. The organization is looking into further research on advanced model architectures and expanding multilingual capabilities while ensuring governance and reliability standards needed for national-scale financial infrastructure. NPCI runs important retail payment systems in India, including UPI, which has become a key digital transaction mode for individuals and small businesses.