The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has partnered with HDFC Bank to develop FiMI Banking, a sovereign artificial intelligence model designed specifically for Indian retail banking. The initiative was announced at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 and focuses on building AI systems that can handle banking tasks within defined operational and regulatory boundaries.
FiMI Banking is designed to go beyond conventional AI systems that primarily respond to customer questions. The model is intended to support agentic banking workflows, allowing AI agents to reason through tasks, interact with banking tools, and complete actions within a controlled banking environment.
The FiMI Banking model has been developed using Indian retail banking scenarios and is built on Gemma, Google’s family of open models. NPCI has further trained the model for banking-specific use cases, with an emphasis on long-context tasks, grounded responses, and adherence to rules defined by financial institutions.
NPCI and HDFC Bank will jointly develop and strengthen the model for banking applications. The work comes as HDFC Bank continues to expand its use of AI across customer service, credit, operations and other banking functions, including the development of an internal AI platform for deploying and evaluating AI agents.
NPCI has introduced AI evaluation frameworks for Indian retail banking, including IndicBank Bench with 799 multi-turn test cases across six banking domains and the Tau² Agentic Banking Benchmark with 1,000 tasks across 50 scenarios. The benchmarks use synthetic data and are being made available to banks, fintechs, developers, and researchers for testing banking AI agents.
FAQs
- What is FiMI Banking?
FiMI Banking is an AI model developed for Indian retail banking, designed to support banking tasks and agentic AI workflows.
- Why are NPCI and HDFC Bank developing FiMI Banking?
The partnership aims to develop AI capabilities suited to Indian banking requirements, including operational controls and regulatory considerations.
- How will AI be used in Indian banking?
AI can support areas such as customer service, banking operations, decision-making, and automated task handling.
- What is agentic AI in banking?
Agentic AI can reason through tasks, interact with banking systems, and perform actions with defined controls rather than only answering questions.
