NPCI Launches FiMI: India’s First Finance-Specific AI Language Model for Payment

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) today released FiMI (Finance Model for India), a domain-specific language model built for India’s payments ecosystem, at the India–AI Impact Summit 2026. Developed in-house by NPCI, FiMI currently powers NPCI’s UPI Help Assistant and is designed to address limitations observed in general-purpose large language models when applied to high-scale, high-trust payment workflows.

FiMI has been built to natively understand the complexity of Indian payment systems, including UPI, covering transaction dispute handling, mandate lifecycle management, and regulatory and ecosystem queries. The model went through continuous pre-training and was further fine-tuned on Indian financial and synthetically generated payments data, enabling accurate reasoning, structured tool invocation, and robust multilingual support. This payments-native design allows FiMI to operate reliably in real-world, high-volume transaction environments where accuracy, consistency, and trust are critical.

FiMI is already deployed at a national scale through NPCI’s UPI Help Assistant launched as pilot initiative, an AI-powered conversational support system for UPI users. This assistant leverages an agentic AI framework that enables multi-step reasoning to respond to payment related queries, support grievance redressal, and assist with mandate management. The assistant currently supports English, Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali, with additional Indian languages planned to be introduced within the next 6 to 8 months to further expand accessibility.

Having successfully developed and validated FiMI in a production environment, NPCI has released a detailed technical paper on the arXiv platform outlining the data curation process, training methodology, and evaluation results. This publication reflects NPCI’s role as a public digital infrastructure institution and its commitment to advancing transparent, India-centric, and trustworthy AI for the payments ecosystem.

Through this technical publication, NPCI is sharing key learnings from building and operating AI systems at a national scale, contributing to broader research and enabling informed development of domain-specific AI systems for financial infrastructure.

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.”

Building on FiMI, NPCI is exploring next-generation model architectures, including Mixture-of-Experts, alongside the expansion of multilingual capabilities to cover a wider range of Indian languages. These efforts are currently in the research and experimentation phase and are focused on improving scalability, efficiency, and domain intelligence, while preserving the governance, reliability, and trust requirements essential for national-scale payment systems.

The detailed technical paper can be accessed here.

Cashfree Payments launches ‘Vendor Payments' to empower businesses to streamline purchase-to-pay cycle

Photo_Akash Sinha, CEO & Co-Founder, Cashfree Payments

Cashfree Payments, India’s leading payments and API banking solutions company, has launched 'Vendor Payments', a comprehensive platform that empowers businesses to streamline and manage their purchase-to-pay cycle, improving efficiency and reducing processing time. 'Vendor Payments' simplifies not only vendor payments, but other account payables including utility bill payments, other business expenses and due taxes.

‘Vendor Payments' enables users to effortlessly upload invoices received from suppliers and other account payables by either manually entering the details or importing them from accounting tools. The solution also supports bulk invoice uploads, enabling businesses to process multiple invoices simultaneously for improved efficiency. Similarly, businesses will have the flexibility to add beneficiary details for payments and easily input invoice details. Once the invoices details are updated, businesses can initiate single or bulk payouts for the unpaid invoices.

‘Vendor Payments' supports various payment modes, including Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT), Interbank Funds Transfer (IFT), and Unified Payments Interface (UPI), ensuring flexibility. ‘Vendor Payments' seamlessly integrates with popular accounting tools like Tally, Tally Prime, and other ERPs for seamless syncing of unpaid invoices and payment statuses. Integration with accounting tools allows for easy export and reconciliation of payment data.

Akash Sinha, CEO and Co-Founder, Cashfree Payments, said, ”We are excited to announce the launch of ‘Vendor Payments', a solution designed to simplify the vendor payment process for businesses. With this new product, our goal is to provide businesses with a comprehensive platform to manage the purchase-to-pay cycle, and other account payables and tax payments, streamlining processes and improving efficiency. ‘Vendor Payments' represents a significant step in revolutionising how businesses manage their accounts payable processes, empowering them with efficiency, accuracy, and control. Cashfree Payments remains committed to innovation and enhancing our offerings to meet the evolving needs of businesses.”

‘Vendor Payments' offers a ‘Maker Checker Flow’ feature that ensures secure approval processes by defining access levels for stakeholders, reducing the risk of unauthorised payments. It provides detailed invoice reports that can be generated for internal audit purposes, providing comprehensive information on invoice numbers, dates, payment terms, beneficiaries, and transfer modes.

With over 50% market share among payment processors, Cashfree Payments today leads the way in bulk disbursals in India with its Payouts and is also among the leading online payment aggregators. India’s largest lender, SBI invested in Cashfree Payments underscoring the company’s role in building a robust payments ecosystem. Cashfree Payments works closely with all leading banks to build the core payments and banking infrastructure that powers the company’s products. Cashfree Payments is also integrated with major platforms such as Shopify, Wix, Paypal, Amazon Pay, Paytm, and Google Pay. Apart from India, Cashfree Payments products are used in eight other countries including the USA, Canada, and UAE. Cashfree Payments has also joined the Account Aggregator framework as a TSP, a global techno-legal framework that enables individuals to share their financial data quickly and securely, with their consent, with any regulated financial institution of their choice. 

Cashfree Payments is a leading payment and API banking solutions company. It provides full-stack payment solutions enabling businesses in India to collect payments and make payouts via all available methods with simple integration. Cashfree Payments' offerings include an advanced and easy way to integrate payment gateways, a split payment solution for marketplaces, bank account verification API, Lending disbursals solution and Auto Collect -- a virtual account solution to match inbound payments to customers. Founded by IIIT Hyderabad alumnus Akash Sinha and IIT Kharagpur graduate Reeju Datta, www.cashfree.com is among the leading payment service providers in India processing transactions worth USD 40 Billion annually. It has leveraged technology to lead payment disbursals in India with more than 50% market share among payment processors. Cashfree Payments enables more than 3,00,000 businesses with payment collections, vendor payouts, wage payouts, bulk refunds, expense reimbursements, loyalty and rewards. Apart from India, Cashfree Payments products are used in eight other countries including the USA, Canada, and UAE. Cashfree Payments is backed by Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator, Apis Partners, State Bank of India (SBI), and was incubated by PayPal.

UK-based Payment Firm TerraPay and NPCI International Collaborate to Drive Seamless Merchant Payments via UPI-enabled QR Codes

In a strategic move to further strengthen its cross-border payment solutions, TerraPay, a leading global payments infrastructure group today announced its partnership with NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), the International arm of National Payments Corporation of India(NPCI). This association with NIPL will allow Indian customers and merchants in India with an active Unified Payments Interface Id(UPI Id) to make and accept cross-border payments seamlessly by leveraging TerraPay’s agile infrastructure and the UPI network.

Left - Ritesh Pai, President-Product & Solutions, TerraPay, Right- Mr. Anubhav Sharma, Head International Business - Partnership, Business Development & Marketing

In this intended collaboration, both companies will work together to further empower Indian customers with active UPI Ids (350 million bank accounts) to be able to transact at QR locations enabled by TerraPay, globally.

Together, both companies intend to fortify UPI payments & QR solutions to extract their maximum potential. The partnership will further increase the use of UPI and QR for cross-border merchant payments. This initiative will speed up the usage of UPI apps across different geographies thereby further enhancing the digital drive for cashless transactions. Furthermore, since UPI payments & QR transactions are customer-initiated with a two-factor authentication it adds an element of non-repudiation and hence drastically reduces disputes and grievance redressal issues. With this collaboration, TerraPay is keen to build interoperability among the various financial instruments that it powers and get marginalized or underserved communities into the mainstream of digital payments.

Unified Payments Interface is an instant real-time payments(RTP) system developed by National Payments Corporation of India. It is amongst the most successful RTP systems globally, providing – simplicity, safety, and security in person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions in India. In 2021, UPI enabled commerce worth 940Bn (~39Bn transactions). In August 2022 alone, the volume of transactions crossed 6.56Bn.

Globally, TerraPay processes pay-outs into 4.5Bn+ bank accounts and 1.5Bn+ mobile wallets. With the vision to foster financial inclusion, residents, POIs, and the Indian diaspora will be able to send money to India by using TerraPay’s agile, transparent and real-time payment highway

Sharing why this partnership is critical to the vision of a cashless world, Ritesh Pai, President-Product & Solutions, TerraPay said, “Our ambition and aim is to collaborate and develop faster, more innovative, and transparent cross-border payment solutions. This effort is with an intent to establish the foundation of a new reality. We will act as a catalyst whether it's enabling interoperability between schemes or countries by bringing in ubiquity, convenience, scale, transparency, and affordability. Our partnership with NIPL is one such strong step to make cross-border payments, immediate, cost-effective, accessible for all, and settled in a secure medium thus adding value to the global payments ecosystem."

Mr. Anubhav Sharma, Head International Business - Partnership, Business Development & Marketing commented, “At NIPL, we are aiming to take the solutions that NPCI has built and established in India to international markets and build a truly interoperable global payments system with other participating nations. We are actively engaging with partners across the world to build partnerships in areas of cross-border acceptance and remittances. With this strategic partnership with TerraPay, we are looking to enhance the overall customer value proposition and provide user-friendly, convenient transaction alternatives to consumers, globally."

About TerraPay

Headquartered in The United Kingdom, TerraPay believes that the smallest payment deserves a borderless journey as safe as the largest. The company has been building an ever-expanding payments highway that empowers businesses to create transparent customer experiences with an uninterrupted, secure, and real-time global passage for every payment, however small or large. Licensed and approved across 26 global markets, TerraPay companies are a leading global partner to banks, mobile wallets, money transfer operators, merchants, and financial institutions, creating a more expansive and inclusive international financial ecosystem. With access to a payments infrastructure that spans the globe, their partners become beacons of the promise of global financial inclusion.  

Bharatpe Expands to 400 Cities Across India; Reaches All-time High of $20 Bn in Annualized Payments TPV

Strengthens its reach in tier-3/4 towns and cities in the country

BharatPe, India’s leading fintech company for merchants, today announced that it has expanded its footprint to 400 towns and cities across India. The expansion is in line with the company’s commitment to driving financial inclusion across Bharat by enabling wider adoption of digital payments as well as addressing the credit gap for SMEs and offline retailers. The company also shared that it has recorded consistent growth in payments TPV and has recently achieved the milestone of US$ 20 bn in annualized TPV.

Last year, BharatPe had announced that it aims to scale its presence to 300 cities by March 2023. The company has aggressively expanded to tier-2, 3 and 4 towns and cities since then, as it believed in the opportunity that tier-2 and beyond towns and cities of the country had to offer. The company has rolled out its UPI QR payment acceptance service and loans to merchant partners in the new cities in the first phase. BharatPe also plans to top up these services with other fintech products like BharatSwipe in the second phase over the coming months.

Commenting on the company’s expansion, Nishant Jain, Chief Business Officer, BharatPe, said, “In line with our endeavour to drive financial inclusion amongst the unbanked and the underserved merchants of Bharat, BharatPe has been expanding its reach and taking UPI QR to tier-2, 3 and 4 towns and cities of the country since 2020. Last year, we had set a target of expanding our footprint to 300 cities by March 2023. I am happy to share that we have not only been able to achieve this milestone much ahead of time, but also surpassed it by a mile. This is a great motivation for a brand like ours that is built on the ethos of empowering MSMEs, offline merchants and kirana store owners of the country who we believe are the key growth drivers of the economy.”

Added Nishant, “We stay committed to building Digital India and are working aggressively to take digital payments to the merchants of Bharat. We are seeing steady growth in digital payments. Our annualised TPV in payments has reached US$ 20 billion recently, up from US$18.5 bn in June end. With the wide expansion across the length and breadth of Bharat, I am confident that we will witness continued growth and will easily surpass our target of US$ 30 bn in payments by March 2023. I am a firm believer of the fact that the next stage of growth for our business will be driven by tier-2, 3 and 4 towns and cities and hence, we will continue to focus on enabling credit for merchants in these areas as well as build new-age fintech products that can further empower their growth story.”

BharatPe has been on an exponential growth trajectory and recently closed one of its highest growth quarters. It facilitated over INR 3600 Cr in loans in Q1, FY23; recording a staggering growth of 112% over the last quarter (Q4, FY22). The company facilitated disbursals to over 1.2 lac merchants in Q1, FY23, up from 66,000 merchants in the last quarter of FY22. BharatPe also hit an all-time high of US$ 18.5 bn in annualized TPV in the quarter. The company also recorded consistent growth in its other business lines including card acceptance POS businesses (BharatSwipe) and its Investment Platform for merchants (growth of over 30% vs. the last quarter).

BharatPe was founded in 2018 with the vision of making financial inclusion a reality for Indian merchants. In 2018, BharatPe launched India’s first UPI interoperable QR code, the first zero MDR payment acceptance service.

In 2020, post-Covid, BharatPe also launched India’s only zero MDR card acceptance terminals – BharatSwipe. Currently serving 1 crore merchants across 400 cities, the company is a leader in UPI offline transactions, processing 18 crores+ UPI transactions per month (annualized Transaction Processed Value of US$ 20 Bn in annualised payments).

The company has already facilitated disbursement of loans totalling to over ₹7500 crores to over 400,000 merchants, since launch. BharatPe’s POS business processes payments of over US$ 4 bn annually on its POS machines. It has a network of 1.25 lac+ machines across cities. BharatPe has raised over US$ 650 million in equity and debt, till date. The company’s list of marquee investors includes Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo and Sequoia Capital. In June 2021, the company announced the acquisition of PAYBACK India, the country’s largest multi-brand loyalty program company with 100 million+ members.

In October 2021, the consortium of Centrum Financial Services Limited (Centrum) and BharatPe, was issued a Small Finance Bank (SFB) license by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). BharatPe also made its entry in the Buy Now Pay Later segment with the launch of postpe in October 2021.

Xsolla Launches Pay Station for Mobile Developers to Unlock Revenue With Customizable Checkout

Xsolla, a leading global video game commerce company, announced new solutions and feature releases during their quarterly release week. Launching this week is their powerful flagship commerce offering Xsolla Pay Station, focused on providing a simple and customizable checkout experience for mobile developers. There are two additional solutions to help developers begin their development journey and successfully manage the growth of their games post launch.

"Xsolla is committed to providing best-in-class services and support for mobile game developers worldwide to help them reach more players in more geographies," said Chris Hewish, President of Xsolla. "As the mobile gaming industry evolves, we are staying ahead of the curve by offering unique features to our mobile solution that help our partners connect with consumers and market to them directly at a lower cost per transaction.”

Xsolla Pay Station:

Xsolla Pay Station introduces significant updates to core functionality and is the only cross-platform branded payment experience for the video game industry. Features include an optimized user flow for an improved purchasing experience, a customizable user interface, streamlined mobile payments, and full support of mobile wallets worldwide.

Xsolla Pay Station delivers the only genuinely adaptive checkout experience for the video game industry and is especially tailored for mobile games. Purchasing and payment habits have significantly evolved. Customers are used to making purchases with their mobile devices and expect every aspect of their buying experience to be intuitive and straightforward. Payment solutions should meet customers' needs, adapt to multiple platforms and devices, and match customers' payment and branded expertise. Pay Station lets developers extend their branded checkout experience across platforms for their users, no matter their preferred payment device or method.

In addition to it, Xsolla’s popular mobile solution now provides more opportunities for mobile game developers to power up their marketing efforts and engage users directly by offering expanded bundles, personalized online store experiences, and unique promotions personalized to players worldwide. As the mobile landscape continues to lead global gaming revenue, Xsolla Web Shop for Mobile Games has added new mechanics, such as expanded bundles of game keys and in-game items including virtual currency, personalized storefront & promotions, to help mobile developers effectively drive users to their branded pages.

If that isn’t all, Xsolla is offering Multi-Platform Publishing, which is an advanced set of features for mobile game developers to support mobile game delivery to PC and the web. With a custom, branded client app and a seamless one-click authentication tool, mobile game developers can reach new gamers at a lower acquisition cost while increasing player loyalty and LTV. By bringing their game to new platforms, developers can grow their revenue potential by monetizing their games in new geographies. With a larger set of payment options, developers are more likely to convert non-paying players intopaying players in underserved markets. The company has further kickstarted a new funding program called Xsolla Accelarator for independent studios that seek games industry guidance and investment support early in their development cycle. Game developers can apply to educational programs led by industry mentors to help shape their game and content production and get the opportunity to receive a bridge fund of up to USD 100,000.00 to prepare them for the next stage of business valuations and investments.

Whether you are a game developer willing to process payouts to user-generated content creators, an esports platform rewarding its players, or a marketplace, Xsolla Payout is another solution by Xsolla to streamline mass payouts to hundreds or thousands of individuals. Xsolla Payouts optimizes operating efficiency by managing multiple contracts with users and content creators, holding tax interviews, facilitating tax reporting, and providing the most accurate account balance calculations.

BCFI to Form Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO) for Finance and Payment Services Industry

Encouraged by the Reserve Bank of India’s invitation to set up Self-Regulatory Organisations (SRO) for financial services and payments industry, the Board of Business Correspondent Federation of India (BCFI), the body representing companies working towards delivery of financial services to underbanked and unbanked citizens, has approved the formation of SRO, subject to due consent from RBI, and appointed Mr. Sunil Kulkarni as the new Head of BCFI and CEO (designate) for the SRO. Mr. Kulkarni is an industry veteran, one of the founding members of BCFI and been on its board since inception.

The team at BCFI will improvise upon the Code of Conduct and Grievance Redressal Mechanism developed last year, and implement them in the earnest among its members with key focus towards ensuring customer protection and betterment of service standards.

In complete alignment with the government’s financial inclusion policy framework and RBI’s vision of National strategy on Financial Education, BCFI SRO team would work towards expediting accessibility of financial services to the citizens and standardisation of banking processes to different corporate BCs. The body continues to play a unique role in building standards and practices for the sector and addressing burgeoning issues and structural challenges whilst putting the customers’ needs at the centre.

“The RBI’s invitation to form an SRO for Payment System Operators is deeply encouraging, and further fortifies our intent to deliver uninterrupted financial inclusion to the unbanked and underbanked citizen of India. We take pride and privilege in proposing Sunil Kulkarni, a veteran in the payments and business correspondents space, as the CEO (designate) of BCFI SRO”, said Sasidhar N Thumuluri, Chairman, BCFI who has taken the responsibility last year from Dr. Anand Srivastava (the founding Chairman of BCFI).

The passion and efforts of BC industry to revolutionise banking and make it ubiquitous has been apparent during this global crisis, as millions have benefitted from the deeply entrenched Agent Business Correspondents (ABC) network in the country. We look forward to grow further under the dynamic leadership of Mr. Kulkarni and his decades of industry expertise. In this increasingly technologically empowered environment, we are duty-bound to ensure that no community is marginalised in the digital payments revolution”, said Anand Kumar Bajaj, Vice Chairman of BCFI.

Commenting on the occasion, Mr. Sunil Kulkarni said, “I am delighted & honoured to have been appointed by Board of BCFI for this position. Through interactions with Banks, Regulators and Government, the Self-Regulatory Organisation for BCs, will work towards setting and enforcing rules and standards relating to the conduct of Corporate BCs and Agent BCs in the industry (members) with the aim of protecting the customer and promoting ethics, equality, and professionalism. We are encouraged by customer and industry friendly policies by RBI, and will continue to strive to provide uninterrupted banking services at the last mile. We are poised to reach a million touchpoints soon, and will refine processes to meet expectations of the regulator from time to time.”

Sunil Kulkarni brings more than 34 years of experience in Services distribution, branchless banking, telecom and mobile wallet technology projects. Sunil was responsible for launching India’s first e-Distribution Network for mobile recharge/Bill Payments in 2004 over Point of Sale (POS) terminals in retail. He was, till recently, Joint MD of Oxigen Services India Pvt Ltd.

About Business Correspondent Federation of India:

Business Correspondent Federation of India (BCFI) is the national federation of Corporate Business Correspondents (CBCs) and Agent Business Correspondents (ABCs) in India. It is a not-for-profit organization that aims to promote responsible finance by systematizing and harmonizing the delivery of financial services to the poor through the critical last mile i.e. the ABCs. The federation interalia also does policy advocacy, promotes financial literacy and customer awareness. BCFI undertakes studies, workshops/conclaves and supports collaborative development activities related to financial inclusion in general and the BC sector in particular. The federation works with its stakeholders towards setting up a quality network, standardized systems and processes that address both supply and demand side challenges holistically.