NPCI rolls out UPI Tap and Pay and an AI help desk built on its own small model

Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra launched two new UPI tools at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on Thursday, 10 September: Tap and Pay for NFC point-of-sale terminals, and MyUPI, a help and control layer built on NPCI’s small language model, FiMI.

Tap and Pay lets a user unlock an NFC phone and hold it to a compatible terminal. The UPI app does not have to open. The phone does not need its own mobile data. The terminal’s connection carries the transaction. NPCI set a PIN-less ceiling of Rs 5,000. Above that, the usual UPI PIN is required. The feature also covers RuPay credit cards on UPI and can run when the handset is in airplane mode.

NPCI said 32 banks, 15 UPI apps, eight acquirers and aggregators, and 18 payment service providers are on Tap and Pay at launch. That is a slice of the full UPI universe, not the whole of it. Merchants still need NFC terminals. A QR sticker on a tea stall will not take a tap.

What MyUPI is for

MyUPI is a single window across banks and apps. NPCI listed a merchant trust check before a payment, a “Pay Again” shortcut, complaint filing in ordinary language, a way to delink a mobile number from UPI IDs, and a safety switch that pauses all UPI debits at once. Twenty-nine banks, 25 UPI apps and 14 technology providers are listed as supporting it.

FiMI, the Finance Model for India, is NPCI’s own small model. Putting customer support on a model the switch owns is a bet that UPI disputes, mandate queries and fraud flags are repetitive enough to handle without sending every user back to their bank’s chatbot. It is also a way to see activity across apps that do not share a front end.

Ajay Kumar Choudhary, NPCI’s non-executive chairman, was on stage with Malhotra and with bankers and fintech founders. An official line at the launch said innovation has to turn into simplicity, choice and trust. The useful test is whether a tap at a working terminal is faster than scanning a QR in bad light, and whether the safety switch actually stops a debit when a phone is stolen.

The stock UPI already carries

NPCI said UPI is running about 24 billion transactions a month. It put biometric-authenticated UPI, launched at the same festival in 2025, at 6.29 billion transactions as of 31 August 2026, and said $700 billion had moved on biometrics alone. A 2025 IMF note already called UPI the world’s largest retail fast-payment system by volume. Tap and Pay is the second large consumer feature after biometrics.

The same morning, SEBI chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey and Malhotra announced Demat 2.0, a pilot to tokenise corporate bonds with atomic settlement through RBI’s wholesale CBDC and the Unified Market Interface. REC, L&T and IIFL have issued tokenised bonds totalling Rs 1,025 crore. That pilot is a wholesale story. Tap and Pay is the retail one that will show up at a chemist if the terminal is the right kind.

Limits that will decide adoption

NFC is still uneven in Indian retail. QR won because a printed square is cheap. A tap needs a terminal that speaks NFC and a phone that has it turned on. The offline claim is real only on the payer side. The merchant still needs a live line. PIN-less taps at Rs 5,000 will draw fraud teams as well as convenience praise.

If the 32 banks and 15 apps treat this as a live product rather than a festival demo, checkout lines at NFC-ready stores will shorten this quarter. If they do not, Tap and Pay joins a list of UPI extras that exist on a slide and not at the counter. MyUPI will be judged on a narrower point: whether a user can freeze every UPI debit without opening five apps.