NPCI Sets Up NTSL For AI And Blockchain, Vishal Kanvaty Named CEO

The National Payments Corporation of India has set up NPCI Tech Solutions Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary that will work on artificial intelligence, blockchain and digital financial infrastructure.

NPCI has appointed Vishal Kanvaty, who has been with the organisation for nearly a decade, as managing director and chief executive of NTSL. The subsidiary was created after approvals from its board and the Reserve Bank of India.

The Fourth Subsidiary

The creation of NTSL also fits a wider pattern in Indian payments. NPCI has moved from running a switch to building an ecosystem of products, and each product needs its own engineering base.

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NTSL is NPCI’s fourth wholly owned subsidiary. The others are NPCI International Payments Limited, NPCI Bharat BillPay Limited and NPCI BHIM Services Limited.

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Each of NPCI’s earlier three subsidiaries was built around a specific mandate. NIPL took UPI and RuPay abroad, NBBL runs bill payments, and NBSL runs BHIM.

For NTSL, the pattern suggests its job is to build technology that the parent does not want to run inside its core payments operation.

Why AI and Blockchain, Together

The two technologies solve different problems for a payments operator, which is why their combination is interesting.

AI is about decisioning: fraud detection, credit assessment, dispute resolution and customer support at a scale no human team can handle.

Blockchain is about record-keeping and settlement across institutions that do not fully trust each other. India already runs one of the largest real-time payment systems in the world, and reconciliation between participants remains expensive.

The Scale It Has to Serve

NPCI’s systems process volumes that most countries cannot match. In October, average daily UPI value crossed Rs 1 lakh crore for the first time, at Rs 1,01,707 crore, with transaction volume up 23% from a year earlier.

At that scale, small inefficiencies compound. A few milliseconds saved per transaction or a percentage point of fraud prevented is worth more than most fintech products earn in a year.

It also means NTSL inherits a live testing ground. Any model it builds is evaluated against real traffic rather than synthetic data, and that feedback loop is hard to buy.

The Governance Question

NPCI is a not-for-profit owned by banks, and its subsidiaries inherit a public-interest mandate. That shapes what NTSL can do.

A blockchain-based settlement layer touches bank books, which brings the RBI into every design decision. An AI model that decides credit or fraud outcomes raises questions of explainability that a private company can avoid and a payments utility cannot.

Kanvaty’s decade inside NPCI is relevant here. Someone who has run parts of the core system knows which processes can be automated first.

What to Watch

One practical test will come early. Blockchain pilots in payments have a habit of staying in pilot. If NTSL can move a live settlement process onto a distributed ledger with real bank participation, that alone justifies the subsidiary.

Three things will show whether NTSL becomes an engineering centre or a real product organisation. The first is whether it publishes technical work, because credibility in AI and blockchain comes from code and papers, not press releases.

The second is commercial scope. If NTSL serves only NPCI, it is a cost centre; if it licenses infrastructure to banks and other countries, it becomes a business.

The third is talent. Competing with private AI labs for engineers while operating inside a not-for-profit utility is the hardest part of the mandate.