Apple Pay Finally Arrives in India, Launching with Axis Bank Amid Stiff Competition and Commercial Hurdles

Apple has officially begun rolling out Apple Pay in India, marking a long-awaited entry into the world’s most populous smartphone market. According to reports, the tech giant’s initial banking partner for the launch is Axis Bank, India’s third-largest private-sector lender. This milestone brings Apple’s proprietary payments service to a massive, rapidly expanding digital economy characterized by intense competition and a payments landscape radically different from Western markets.

However, the initial rollout is heavily restricted. Apple Pay currently supports only eligible Axis Bank credit cards issued on the Visa and Mastercard networks, entirely omitting India’s homegrown and widely utilized RuPay network. Furthermore, transaction acceptance is confined to merchants and payment terminals that have been specifically enabled to handle the service.

Despite these early limitations, Apple has lined up an array of prominent retail and digital partners. The company stated that the service will be accepted by millions of merchants across India, featuring popular consumer platforms such as Blinkit, Croma, Ixigo, Reliance brands, Tata 1mg, and Zomato. To build this acceptance network, Apple has collaborated closely with major payment service providers, including Cashfree, JusPay, Mswipe, Paytm, PayU, Pine Labs, Razorpay, and Worldline.

For eligible Axis Bank customers, the integration allows them to seamlessly add their credit cards to the Apple Wallet app, enabling secure online purchases as well as contactless payments at supported physical terminals. Nevertheless, the user experience may face initial friction. Industry insiders note that an Apple Pay transaction might succeed at a terminal operated by an independent payments provider that has enabled the service, yet fail at another terminal whose underlying acquiring bank has not yet completed integration. Consequently, merchant acceptance may appear uneven during the early stages of the rollout, even for consumers holding supported cards.

The arrival of Apple Pay in India highlights a stark contrast with the country’s existing digital payments ecosystem. While the U.S. and many Western economies rely heavily on card-based infrastructure, India’s digital payments revolution has been overwhelmingly driven by the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Backed by the state, UPI allows consumers to execute instant, seamless bank-to-bank transfers without ever needing to rely on traditional credit or debit cards. Scanning a QR code to transfer money directly from a bank account has become an everyday habit for hundreds of millions of Indians, meaning UPI handles the vast majority of digital transactions in the country.

Apple Pay, by contrast, operates on a card-based architecture that requires individual banking issuers and payment infrastructure providers to build direct integrations. This structural difference makes a broad, rapid rollout considerably more complex than launching a UPI-adjacent application.

Furthermore, Apple’s commercial terms have emerged as a significant sticking point with several of India’s largest financial institutions. According to sources familiar with the negotiations, Apple is seeking a fee of approximately 20 basis points, or 0.2%, on transactions processed through the platform. This proposed fee structure takes a substantial bite out of the roughly 40 to 50 basis points of total margin available within the domestic payments layer. While the fee model is broadly consistent with how Apple operates Apple Pay in other international markets, it has created friction with major local players. Prominent lenders such as HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI Card are notably absent from the initial launch lineup as negotiations over commercial terms remain ongoing. Representatives for Apple, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI Card did not respond to requests for comment regarding the launch.

Despite the dominance of UPI and ongoing commercial friction with major banks, Apple Pay holds distinct strategic value. The service is expected to strongly appeal to India’s fast-growing base of affluent iPhone users, a demographic that is statistically more likely to possess and utilize premium credit cards. For the country’s top-tier banks, catering to these high-value consumers could make Apple Pay difficult to ignore over the long term, regardless of UPI’s overarching market share.

Even if Apple Pay remains a relatively niche player in transaction volume compared to state-backed infrastructure, the underlying economics remain compelling for Apple. The transaction fees collected from the service will provide the iPhone maker with an additional, recurring revenue stream, helping monetize its expanding user base in one of its most critical growth markets.

This payments milestone is the latest chapter in Apple’s broader strategic expansion across India, where the company has aggressively scaled up iPhone sales, local manufacturing operations, and its physical retail footprint. Driven by a surging local preference for premium mobile devices, Apple captured 28% of India’s smartphone market by value in 2025, climbing from 23% during the previous year, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

Manufacturing ties have deepened concurrently. India currently accounts for approximately a quarter of global iPhone production, a share that industry reports and government officials indicate could rise to between 30% and 35% over the next five years. As Apple continues to weave itself deeper into the fabric of the Indian economy through hardware manufacturing, retail stores, and now financial services, the introduction of Apple Pay cements another vital pillar in the tech giant’s long-term strategy for the region.