With India emerging as the second-largest adopter of leading agentic AI platforms such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex, the country’s fintech ecosystem has a significant opportunity to build small language models using India’s rich public datasets, according to Dilip Asbe, Managing Director and CEO of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Speaking at the Mumbai Tech Week, Asbe said, “You will see a large amount of small language models because it's very difficult for companies like us to play a capitalistic game. Rather, we will use the game for trying to solve the specific use cases, specific problems as much close to making it deterministic in that process”. 

Referring to FiMI (Finance Model for India), the domain-specific AI model launched earlier this year by NPCI at the India AI Impact Summit, Asbe said the platform, which currently supports UPI-related customer service transactions, is already seeing around one million users every month. He added that the number is expected to rise sharply over the coming months, with nearly one million users projected to access FiMI on a daily basis to resolve issues related to UPI transactions. 

“The way we look at it, there will be multiple use cases of FiMI. We have written the first use case of UPI And that's the first one to drive in the market, but I'm very sure that between NPCI, banks, and ecosystem, we'll start seeing multiple such use cases, sharp, specific, tool-driven use cases for FiMI,” said Asbe.   

Emphasising on continuing NPCI’s strategy of open-source tech, “You can expect at least three or four small-language models in a different use case, that is what we’ve been talking about in the few months' time,” he further added.   

With NPCI International Payments, the wholly-owned subsidiary of National Payments Corporation of India, now enabling UPI-based transactions across nearly eight countries, covering around two million international merchants and 20 global partners, Asbe said discussions are underway with high-traffic markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia for further expansion. “I’m sure that the moment these three or four additional markets come under bilateral arrangements with India, we will start seeing very high transaction volumes in these areas,” Asbe added.