New Delhi: FiMI – the Finance Model for India – was announced by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) as a domain-specific language model designed for India’s digital payments infrastructure.
FiMI was unveiled at the India–AI Impact Summit 2026 and is currently powering NPCI’s UPI Help Assistant, an AI-powered conversational support system built for UPI users.
The launch of FiMI aims to address limitations observed in general-purpose large language models when deployed in high-scale, high-trust payment workflows.
According to NPCI, FiMI has been built to natively understand the complexity of Indian payment systems, including UPI workflows such as transaction dispute handling, mandate lifecycle management, and regulatory and ecosystem queries.
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FiMI underwent continuous pre-training and was further fine-tuned using Indian financial data and synthetically generated payments data.
This approach enables FiMI to deliver accurate reasoning, structured tool invocation, and multilingual support tailored to financial services.
NPCI stated that FiMI is already operating at national scale through the UPI Help Assistant pilot initiative.
The AI-powered assistant built on FiMI uses an agentic AI framework capable of multi-step reasoning to respond to payment-related queries, assist with grievance redressal, and support mandate management.
Currently, the Finance Model for India supports English, Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali, with additional Indian languages expected to be introduced within the next six to eight months to improve accessibility across the ecosystem.
FiMI: NPCI Releases Technical Paper on arXiv
Following validation in a production environment, NPCI released a technical paper on arXiv detailing the architecture, data curation process, training methodology, and evaluation results behind the Finance Model for India.
The publication highlights NPCI’s efforts to promote transparent and India-centric AI development for financial infrastructure through Finance Model for India, while sharing insights from deploying AI systems at national scale.
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Commenting on the announcement, Vishal Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer, NPCI said, “FiMI reflects NPCI’s commitment in developing financial language models purpose-built for India’s payments ecosystem.
Having successfully built and validated the model, we are now sharing our technical learnings through a detailed paper to contribute to responsible innovation, while strengthening trust, transparency, and collaboration across the ecosystem.”
NPCI also indicated that future research building on Finance Model for India will explore next-generation architectures such as Mixture-of-Experts models, along with expanded multilingual capabilities covering more Indian languages.
These research efforts around Finance Model for India are focused on improving scalability, efficiency, and domain intelligence while maintaining governance, reliability, and trust requirements essential for national-scale payment systems.
