Vishal Kanvaty walked into the boardroom of NPCI Tech Solutions Ltd (NTSL) on Monday, ready to lead the new venture that will push the National Payments Corporation of India beyond its core payments role.
NPCI, the operator behind India’s Unified Payments Interface, announced the creation of NTSL as a wholly owned subsidiary focused on artificial intelligence, blockchain and other digital infrastructure. Kanvaty, who has worked with NPCI for almost ten years, was named managing director and chief executive officer. The firm will act as the group’s technology and innovation arm, handling global capability centre services and providing tech support for eKYC Setu, the Unified Ticketing Platform and other digital public infrastructure programmes.
“Advances in AI and emerging technologies are opening up opportunities across digital infrastructure and financial services,” NPCI MD and CEO Dilip Asbe said. He added that the subsidiary is intended to pursue those opportunities and strengthen the group’s technology capabilities.
The move follows a series of NPCI initiatives aimed at modernising the payments ecosystem. In September, NPCI unveiled AiNxt, a platform that lets enterprises build, test and deploy custom AI agents, and AtOM, which automates workflow integration, change management and partner onboarding for UPI. Earlier in the year, the corporation entered a multi‑year research partnership with the Indian Institute of Science to explore AI and blockchain, producing models, software prototypes and training programmes.
At the Global Fintech Fest 2025, NPCI demonstrated an agentic AI framework for UPI that enables user‑authorised assistants to discover products, place orders and complete payments in a single conversational flow.
NTSL joins three existing subsidiaries—NPCI International Payments Ltd, NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd and NPCI BHIM Services Ltd—bringing the total to four. The expansion arrives as the UPI network continues to grow; it processed a record 25.47 billion transactions in October, a 5.8% month‑on‑month rise, with transaction value climbing 7.4% to ₹31.53 lakh crore.