Falcon launches MerlinFX, the first AI workforce built into a live banking core
The agents handle reconciliation, disputes, risk monitoring, customer service, campaign management, premium-cardholder engagement and card inventory. They work on the bank's ledger and follow its rules, while actions that cannot be reversed require approval from a designated bank officer.
Two agents, ReconFX and SurgeFX, are already in production with Falcon's CardFX and CreditFX stacks at banks including Karur Vysya Bank and Jana Small Finance Bank. The remaining five are being rolled out among clients. Falcon's platform processes more than 15 million cards and accounts.
Why banks need this now
India's payment volumes are expanding, increasing the operational burden on financial institutions. UPI processed 24,162 crore transactions worth Rs 314 lakh crore in FY 2025-26, and a June 2025 IMF paper described it as the world's largest retail fast-payment system by volume. The number of outstanding credit cards reached 122.86 million in July 2026, up 9.9 per cent year on year, according to RBI data. The RBI's FREE-AI committee has set the principle governing this shift: final decisions rest with humans, not AI models.
How MerlinFX works
Unlike AI tools that analyse data exported from a bank's core system, MerlinFX operates within a processing core Falcon built itself, running inside its real-time infrastructure. Cards, loans, wallets and UPI run on a platform and event stream, enabling the agents to respond as transactions occur. SurgeFX can act when a transaction is authorised, while ReconFX can match settlement files against the ledger as soon as they arrive.
Early results have been promising: in an initial pilot, ReconFX auto-matched the majority of transactions and surfaced breaks and leakage that had previously gone unnoticed.
The seven agents
- SurgeFX identifies customer segments, tests campaign economics and launches offers.
- ReconFX continuously matches transactions across networks, switches and ledgers, and prioritises breaks by value.
- RiskFX monitors repayment, utilisation and transaction behaviour for early indications of delinquency, non-performing assets or fraud.
- DisputeFX classifies chargebacks, UPI reversals and failed transactions, prepares evidence and drafts resolutions against the applicable network rule for a single sign-off.
- ResolveFX handles routine requests across WhatsApp, SMS and voice, in the customer’s own language and escalating exceptions.
- ConciergeFX manages proactive services for premium cardholders, including expiring rewards.
- OpsFX forecasts branch-level card demand and reallocates available kits before new orders are placed.
Existing Falcon clients can activate the agents through configuration, while institutions using other cores can connect through Falcon's APIs.
Governance and security
MerlinFX operates within Falcon's security and compliance framework, which is certified to PCI DSS, PCI 3DS, PCI PIN and ISO/IEC 27001 and undergoes annual CERT-In empanelled testing. It can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises.
Any action that moves money, changes a credit limit or account status, or commits the bank to a customer is referred to a named officer under the bank's maker-checker process. Inference takes place in India within the bank's environment, and data is neither pooled nor used to train shared models, nor kept by any model provider — consistent with RBI data localisation requirements. Each recommendation and approval is recorded in an immutable audit trail. Banks also retain control over approval routes, campaign budgets, thresholds and risk limits.
"Banks do not have an intelligence problem. They have a latency problem. Their underlying systems were built for end-of-day processing, and adding AI on top does not change when the data arrives," said Priyanka Kanwar, Co-founder and CEO of Falcon. "We rebuilt the core so the data arrives as the transaction happens. MerlinFX puts agents to work as transactions happen, inside the system of record, while ensuring that a bank officer approves every consequential action. This is how every financial institution will operate in 2040. On Falcon it is already how they operate."
MerlinFX can support credit cards, credit lines, loans, current and NRI accounts, and wallets across banks, NBFCs, prepaid issuers, payment aggregators and fintechs.
About Falcon
Falcon is a cloud-native banking infrastructure platform on which Indian banks and financial institutions run their credit card, Credit Line on UPI, prepaid, lending and UPI businesses. Founded in 2022 by Prabhtej Bhatia, Priyanka Kanwar and Chinmaya Desai, the company operates as a technology service provider and issuer-processor, combining a processing core, application and program management layers, and AI agents for risk, operations and portfolio growth on a single platform. Falcon is backed by investors in India, Japan and the United States and is expanding into Southeast Asia and Europe.