NPCI and HDFC launch sovereign AI model built specifically for Indian retail banking

India’s National Payments Corporation of India, the organization that runs the country’s wildly popular UPI payments system, just made a significant leap beyond payments. At the Global Fintech Festival 2026, NPCI unveiled FiMI Banking, which it calls India’s first sovereign compact AI model designed specifically for retail banking. The model was built on Google’s open Gemma family of models and trained on Indian retail banking scenarios. HDFC Bank, India’s largest private sector lender, is collaborating on the project to refine it further. What FiMI actually does FiMI Banking is designed for what the AI world calls “agentic tasks,” meaning it can reason through multi-step processes and take actions while staying within banking regulatory guardrails, processing long-context banking interactions with an understanding of Indian regulatory requirements baked in. One notable design choice: the entire model was trained on synthetic data, not real customer information. That’s a deliberate move to ensure data sovereignty, a concept that’s become increasingly important as countries push back against sensitive financial data flowing through foreign AI systems trained on cross-border datasets...